Claiming Her. Marilyn "Mattie" Brahen

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СКАЧАТЬ apartment. I later discovered, rather rudely, that one affair he stayed to settle had been with a woman I’d never met, and only found out about due to a dangerous legacy she had passed on to Richard, who had then passed it on to me.

      If Richard had played his adulterous games in the 1990s, the news he brought back the following Sunday might have been my death sentence. But the AIDS virus had not begun to spread rampantly among heterosexuals in the early 1970s, and at least Richard had the common sense to tell me he had syphilis. Early diagnosis allowed him to cure it with penicillin. He strongly advised me—his departmental words exactly—to see a doctor and get some penicillin for myself.

      I immediately called a Planned Parenthood clinic, let them take a blood test, and was also put on penicillin. The doctor said he would call if there were further complications, but I had apparently escaped Richard’s foolhardiness, as no further problems surfaced medically.

      Emotionally, I had to confront the truth, two truths to be exact: that Richard had been unfaithful to me, and that the dark spirit calling himself Bael had good cause to ask me to refuse Richard’s sexual advances.

      I needn’t have worried about Richard making further moves on me. He knew how deeply upset I had been about his cheating and the syphilis. He told me he’d be staying with his own folks until we resolved our marital problems. I won’t deny that I was vastly relieved to hear this. But I never believed he was simply being considerate of my feelings and my family’s comfort. It seemed to me he really wanted his freedom. He even told my father that he’d done a foolish thing and felt I’d need time away from him before I could forgive him. My father didn’t respond to that, already furious with him, for Father was a man who held steadfast grudges. But he did tell Richard to find a job and act like a good husband to me, and then perhaps his wife might forgive, if not forget, the bad marital beginning.

      I neither forgave him nor forgot, and from that moment on, I no longer loved Richard.

      CHAPTER 3

      No one in my family blamed me. They seemed to accept my separation from Richard as the lesser of two evils, as if they thought the future would be far more horrid if I stayed with him. I agreed.

      I finally told Mother, on a quiet Monday afternoon two weeks after moving back to Philadelphia, of the warning the dark spirit calling himself Bael had given me, and my initially pegging it as possessive jealous intrusion. Mother listened carefully as I related the psychic conversations I had had with him, those last two days in Queens.

      “Are you sure you haven’t sensed him in the slightest way since your first night home?” she asked.

      “Not at all. It’s almost as if his only purpose was to prevent me from catching VD.”

      “That doesn’t jive with his story about returning to claim you, obviously as a lover, which would be an intrusion into a mortal woman’s life.” She cupped her chin in her hand, her eyes taking on the distant look she always wore while thinking. “It could have been symbolic,” she said finally. “He loved you then, and he returned to keep you from potential harm, and departed to his own proper plane of existence, the job finished. A fine theory, except that he seemed to flee at the mention of God.”

      I spooned sugar into my coffee and stirred it slowly. “I’d like to know the answers to the riddles he gave when you questioned him: He’s from a place where he and I were meant to be, but he couldn’t let me ‘follow’ him there . . . and he seems to claim he knew me before historic times, but he’s been watching me ever since. Watching over me?”

      Mother pursed her lips. “I’m not sure. His last response mentioned angels living among mortals . . . no. Forced to live among mortals. And he called us ‘pale imitations.’ Of what? Angels?”

      “There’s one fluke in your theory. He specifically said—the last thing he said—he means to win me back.” I hesitated, then decided to spill my gut feeling. If I needed my mother’s help with this, I couldn’t hold anything back. “I get the feeling this is unfinished business, Mom, at least as far as this Bael spirit is concerned. But I can’t pick up on having known him before. I’ve probed and probed, and I’m coming up blank. And yet . . . .”

      There are moments when a strong current seems to enter a conversation, and you know someone has something very important to add, a fact or a response which holds a key, a breakthrough, to its comprehension. Mother must have sensed this, for her head, which had been lowered introspectively, snapped upward, her posture, her expression, and her voice sharp with attention. “And yet what?”

      I wet my lips, afraid to admit it, fearing her ridicule, her horror, or both. I had no idea why I thought she would respond that way. What I felt could take on a hundred different meanings, spurred by a hundred different causes, and even be a misinterpretation on my part, near the mark, but not correctly on it.

      “Well, Leigh Ann? You may as well talk it out. We’re not going to solve this by running away from it. You know as well as I do that in psychic disturbances, fear and ignorance—especially ignorance masquerading as innocence—can be deadly.”

      “I feel as if I love him.” I said it simply, with no flourishes or emotion.

      “Love him? Or loved him?”

      “Love him. Deeply and unconditionally. But I can’t recollect any lifetime, not a single memory from what I can recollect, in which we were together.”

      Mother sat stock-still, not looking at me, having gone from pursing her lips to gnawing on her lower lip.

      “I know that sounds ridiculous. I know you probably think I’m succumbing to some silly romantic notion.”

      “Or to a sexual entrapment spell.”

      “It doesn’t feel like that. I’m completely capable of refusing or ignoring him if he acts untrustworthy or dangerous. And I wouldn’t accept him as a spiritual guide or contact anyway. Not unless I solved the question of who he is and why he’s here, and he proved worthy of my attention.”

      Mother stood up abruptly.

      “What?” I asked.

      “Nothing,” she said. “I thought I heard Daniel crying. He’s about due to wake up from his nap, isn’t he?”

      I glanced at the kitchen clock. “Probably. He’s been asleep for two hours now.” She was studying me somberly. “Funny. I didn’t hear anything.”

      Not answering, she moved through the dining room and living room, then stood at the base of the staircase, looking up.

      “He will wake up if we talk here,” I said.

      She nodded and motioned us back to the kitchen. “Must have imagined it.” She dumped our coffee cups into the sink and began selecting food from the fridge to prepare for dinner.

      “At any rate,” I told her, “my attraction to this spirit, whatever’s causing it, is a moot point. He’s apparently gone. I just may be a silly romantic goose, simply because he was right about Richard and acted so protectively toward me. It’s obvious I never knew him before, or I’d have remembered him, pushy behavior and all. All I can come up with is the possibility that we never really met, but he somehow knew of me, and built it into some intense and unrequited fantasy about me.”

      Mother stopped chopping the lettuce and leaned, wearily, I thought, on the counter. “We’ve completely overlooked something СКАЧАТЬ