A Bright House

“There is an old racing sailboat in Maine, near where I sail, and I love to see it on the starting line with me, for it is perhaps the most beautiful sailboat I have ever seen; its name is ‘Desperate Lark’, which I also think is beautiful. You are now embarked on a desperate lark, which is just what you should be doing right now. And your reflections are the reflections of a person who has encountered, and taken a measure of, the power of life on our sweet Earth. You’ll return, restored to balance, refreshed, but it takes time to heal. We’ll all be here on the shore when you come back, waiting for you.” ~ Daniel Dennett, to his grieving friend

When Jenny and Ray reached the eastern edge of Ward’s Island, she indicated that they should walk south, saying that another path would appear to allow them passage through a wide field that eventually linked to the southern island perimeter. A long shore hugging boardwalk that was dotted with benches would give them privacy and a nice open view of the lake. Ray said that it sounded ideal, and mentioned that he didn’t normally confide in new friends to such detail as he had when speaking of his mother and the clairvoyance.

“I leave after tomorrow, Jenny” he stated quietly but bluntly, “and I truly want to help you. It feels very important to me that I do.” She didn’t reply but noted the fresh inward wince at his being with her for such an abbreviated amount of time, which made little sense but was undeniably a tiny stab of aches ahead. They walked southward in silence as the sunlight took an angular dip toward its daily farewell. The temperature remained pleasant, the air remarkably rejuvenating for such a metropolitan reality, and before long Jenny and her also remarkable companion began to walk west through tall field grasses, wildflowers, clumps of dense low lying bush and scattered stands of trees. Where, during the streetcar ride, she had glanced furtively at him, something in the candor of his words coupled with the cold truth of time passing indifferently, quickly, caused her to begin looking at him openly as they walked. He was to her left. His eyes roved the terrain, admired the purplish golden light as it bellied up to broken cloud cover, and Jenny took long unabashed looks at his profile. Hours later, alone in her bed, she would not be able to recapture the essence of those slippery moments distilled into myriad conflicting emotions.

The timing of their sunset stroll placed them ahead of the busy tourist season, which was mostly relegated to the central island with its amusement park and petting zoo. As they cut across the field to approach the long boardwalk, only two other people, homeowners out walking their dogs, shared the expanse between eastern rim and southern stroll. Jenny found herself sinking, slowly but inexorably as though one step at a time, into a simmer of anxiousness. Ray, on the other hand, seemed both entirely relaxed and newly focused, almost grim faced as he silently assessed whatever was happening behind those lupine eyes of his. “You need not worry” he said suddenly as their footfalls caused nails to creak in the old boardwalk planks. She wanted to protest that she wasn’t, but knew it was of little use.

“I can help you if you allow me to, but you need to be sure that you are willing to hear whatever may come to me. Please give that some thought over the next few minutes, okay?” A strong impulse, in hindsight to be expected, seized her with the recklessness of what she was doing here with him. After all, who was he? How could year upon year of careful self management vanish so thoroughly with the arrival of a person completely unknown to her? As soon as she thought it, “unknown”, it was dismissed outright. Discarded by a deeper knowledge that existed prior to the many layers of noise heaped upon it through the inefficient human infancy of thought processes. She knew it as well as she knew her own fears; he was there to help her. Not only by his pure intent, but through a mysterious placement of his unique qualifications into an alluring physical form that conquered Jenny’s stubbornly maintained security system. His gift of sight, his conduct, and the impeccable timing of their meeting. A meeting that some insistent whispering awareness wanted to disclose as merely the most recent one.

The sky over lake Ontario began to give way to a cobalt blue of spreading inevitability. They passed a dozen wooden benches that were separated by hundreds of feet, each one bearing a metal sign attached to the backrest, some noting lives that had come and gone, others mentioning people who had carried the good graces of philanthropy. Ray asked Jenny if she was finding the evening temperature a touch chilly; she responded “not at all”, and they walked a little longer. Eventually, nearing the western border of Ward’s Island where it became Centre Island, Ray noticed a break in the thickness of the boardwalk’s hem of trees.

“This would be a nice place to stop” he indicated a tall maple that stood majestically apart in an open swath of overgrown grass. The location boasted a clear sightline across the darkening lake water and its ever blurring sky horizon. Jenny thought, well... here it is, and agreed to the resting place. During the entire walk since departing from the ferry, Ray had been aware of his companion’s combative emotions. His intuition spoke clearly in warning; she was terribly alone and wanted it that way. However, she had chosen to open up to him. An inexplicable trust had risen, perhaps also with her finding him alluring, possibly attractive in the way that she had long since given up when viewing men. He wanted to find the balance within his showing genuine compassion and the extending of warmth that could allow her to grant him permission to assist, but recognized the fine line he was treading. He had been there many times through his work. Saviour syndrome. Hero attraction. Appeal of the unique. By the time he and Jenny approached the trunk of the tall maple, Ray decided that erring on the side of empathy and pure motives would be the only method.

“Okay, Jenny” he began as they stopped below the tree’s canopy very near its base. “I feel that you have placed a good degree of trust into our combined energy. You know why I am here with you, and I have been privy to very strong impressions, but we can carry on without delving further if that is what you wish.” He paused, looking down at her. She removed her hat, realizing in a flash how ludicrous it must have seemed for her to be wearing it with the sunlight almost completely rotated away. With no accurate barometer of measuring the elasticity of those moments beneath the tree, before they began, Jenny felt that the brink before her held dualistic outcomes. It seemed that she hesitated much too long as he looked at her, his eyes steady but gentle, patient. The whispering who is this man, who is this man? Later in her lonely bed, being ruthlessly honest, she admitted to a wanting... for exchange. Yes; that the clearest most articulate voice in her mind of minds was telling her hope fables embroidered with promises. She may have been presented with this beautiful opportunity to exchange Scott, for Ray Townes. How vulgar and audacious a thought was that one? Just how deeply would that laceration wound her, should she prove herself an assumptive, dreaming fool?

“I know you mean only well” she spoke as if from within another nearby body. Ray nodded and smiled his peculiar instantly charismatic warmth, eyes crinkling in waning light from one body that exchanged with another, the full lunar disc beginning to appear above the lake... “I work best using personal objects in tandem with the speaking voice” he said, motioning that she sit against the maple tree trunk, “preferably metal objects.” The grass grew high and close around the maple, Jenny noted, and took a cross-legged seat with her back against the bark, facing out over the water that shimmered only a hundred yards distant. Ray moved to squat before her, reached out his hand to lightly touch the face of the watch around her left wrist. She made a motion as though to remove it, but he held up a hand, no... before going to his knees in the grass in front of her. He gently grasped Jenny’s wrist, folding his large fingers beneath it, the thumb across her watch, his palm resting on top of the back of her hand. She didn’t flinch or retract from his touch, but an involuntary shiver quaked visibly through her arms. Being touched at all, even in passing on the city streets or when shopping in a crowded market, had become almost intolerable. This... this intimacy from a man’s hand touching hers, disarmingly innocuous yet laden with nearly exposed nerve endings...

“Trust me, Jenny” he interrupted the free-fall of her mental reactions, and in one fluid motion he had taken a place beside her against the tree, both strong hands suddenly gripping her around the waist, lifting effortlessly, reminding her in a flash of a foster father who had become a devil, that thought replaced by Ray’s benevolent energy, and seconds later she found herself in front of Ray... he had moved her to sit directly in front of him, her back pressed into his chest. Before she could react in recoil, he immobilized her in every way with the warm anchoring, impossibly comforting, placement of his hands around her wrists. She flashed back to the marble, rolling across her dining room floor... Jenny was sure he must hear the rush of her pulse in his own ears. Her heart galloped for a mad moment. Her hat, still clutched in the right hand, fell silently to the grass. She leaned back wordlessly, drowning in the thrum of her racing heartbeat, and allowed for the melting into, even if it was misguided, delusional, reckless, hopeless, pre-suicidal. His body heat didn’t intrude. The long fingers of his runic tattooed hands, they radiated heat around the circumference of her small bones, soothing her skin, relaxing the split seconds of panic.

“I’m going to begin to pick up impressions, information” he spoke softly. “Most of my adult life has been one of my following some form of all-knowing guidance, Jenny. Never have I felt more guided than I do right now, here with you.” She settled into his energy, into an awareness that he meant only to help, even if that in some peculiar way birthed a keen disappointment within her. “I am sitting with you this way, this closely, because I need for you to open up to me to the fullest of your ability. Can you try?” his voice resonated into memory ghosting once again.

She looked out across the now inky waves, splashed with dances of lunar light as their planet hung in space, spinning. When she nodded vigorously, he pressed his chin down into her hair as if to say, good, and the subtle hint of sandalwood relaxed her further. Inexplicable. Freeing. A why not? All lost means nothing to lose. Ray’s breathing changed before he began to speak in a long string of sentences. She could feel the rise and fall of his chest against her back and shoulders, deepening, slowing... it caused her to completely dispense with the annoying scatterings of doubt-thought. More, more, she relaxed into his body energy, warmth, and the already familiar comfort awareness levels that had revealed themselves to her earlier as they walked from the diner to her home. Ray’s hand rested slightly heavier upon the wristwatch. He began.

“I am getting a one syllable name. The vowel is an o... Rob, Rod, Tom, Bob, Scott... yes, Scott I believe, and please don’t answer or interrupt as I speak. Losing him meant that you were left here to grieve, for both of you. Most of your pain revolved around his loss. He would not father the children you planned for, or be alive to watch them grow. You felt that he had been cruelly cheated out of everything. I’m receiving impressions that have me feeling a shortness of breath, and I have something to confess to you later... I feel that you mourned Scott so intensely because you were mourning yourself. You were a fusion of two souls into one shared dream, vision, a higher entity... somewhere in that feeling of, I have died along with him, lies the way back out from never ending grief. Because he lives on within you, he cannot have died so completely. The part of him that you keep alive, would want you to live, if he could speak his heart through you now, and I sense that you know this. Jenny, when our bodies die do you truly believe that our consciousness dies, too? Your Scott is so much more than a body, a missing body; he is a pattern of energy with all of that energy’s components spread throughout the vast spectrum of a human mind, which is of itself a quintessential mystery manifestation of higher energy. And I want to ask you, why did you remove all of his photos? Did you lose the him, the Scott, to that pain so attached to your anger? Did you lose the him in the photographs to the it of an image on a flat piece of paper? Do you see how this kind of angry grieving can lie to us, Jenny? That we contradict our nature, our spiritual makeup, by keeping loved ones both alive and dead?

I feel very strongly that he loved you, loves you, purely. I don’t get the sense of him having departed... and I want to say he is waiting for you to accept the truth of his not returning... from, home? Yes... he left your home... this feels accurate to me, so strong an impression... he left and couldn’t return. Some manner of freakish occurrence. Something that took place when he was alone, though he wasn’t supposed to be alone... the plan changed at the last hour and Scott went ahead with it. I sense more here, but it isn’t coming just yet, and please don’t tell me anything... I am remembering a quote now, that a person is a psyche’s point of view... he is gone from Scott’s body, but Scott remains on the psychic plane, though this seems unclear to me. I want to say, he didn’t have enough time to react to what was happening to him, to fight to stay. But there is something off in this... off... so strange... ”

Jenny’s body had been wracking with the effort to contain sobs that began halfway through Ray’s monologue. She recalled the self-hugging posture, post nightmare, and wanted to grip herself into emotional retreat. Ray’s hands remained warm and firm, the fingers encircling her lower forearms and wrists, those on his right hand caressing the band of her watch.

One Saturday, hours from concluding, happened upon the subsequent days with that name, and changed them all.