Bless the Child (44 page)

“‘Because this gift I give you is as cruel as it is great, Mim-Atet-Ra, I will allow you to sip an elixir that will ease your pain.’ A golden goblet appeared before me, and numbly, I touched it to my lips, but something stayed my hand.

“‘What is this drink? I asked, long past fear.

“‘It is the Water of Forgetfulness . . . that you will not remember your sin.’

“‘Nor Karaden,
I thought.
Nor our child.
I handed back the cup, for it is better to remember love, despite the anguish. Stubbornness or courage, call it what you will . . . I regret not my choice.

“‘And so my sorrow was wrought long ago, by my own hand. Many years did I live after that day, and longer still they seemed to me. I was High Priestess of the Goddess Isis at Saqqara, by the time I passed through the portals of earthly existence. I healed many, and counseled many in my time, and I had served the Great Mother, faithfully. As I have done, in one way or another, through all the lifetimes since.

“While my soul has made its earthly sojourn, I have watched the Mother’s Mysteries brought low. I have seen the balance shift for humanity—the Female Principle laid waste, and the Male Principle taking power, bringing with it male excesses. When will humanity understand, as I did on that fateful day of revelation, that only when male and female come into respectful balance, can life truly prosper? Excess of either principle brings distortion and dishonor.

“We stand now at the Great Crossroad. The Messenger and the Guardian have been sent forth for the final reckoning, and the players are assembled on the field.
O Isis, Ra, defend us and strengthen our frailties! We are too human for this task.”

Dr. Heinrich Strater saw the stricken face of Peter Messenguer as he stared at Maggie. She opened her eyes and looked deeply into his, and said in the voice of Mim:

“Karaden, beloved twin-soul, had we been but simple fisher-folk, we could have lived our love, and left behind our seed. Instead we are unwilling players in the deadliest game of all, and the fate of the Universe hangs by the thread of our desires. Goddess help me, unworthiest of Thy children! Let me not falter until the price be paid.”

Strater, stunned by the events of the previous few minutes, reached tentatively for Maggie’s hand with his own.

“Mim, dear,” he said tenderly, realizing with a pang that Mim had become unutterably real to him, too. “We thank you for sharing your remarkable story with us . . . and we wish you well on your journey. We will pray for you.” He glanced at Peter, who was now trying to collect himself. He seem to have aged ten years in an hour.

“Please return Maggie to us now . . . it is time for her to come home to us. Will you raise your right hand when Maggie has returned?” The hand began to waver, upward. “Thank you,” he said, then paused a moment. “It is time to re-board the sailboat on the river of time. Please instruct the pilot that under no circumstances are any stops to be made, until you have safely reached 1993, here in my office.”

Minutes later, Maggie, Peter, and Dr. Strater sat staring at one another. Finally, the psychiatrist spoke.

“Quite frankly, I don’t really understand what we’ve just experienced. But it appears there’s a good deal of work to be done here . . .”

“Thank you, Dr. Strater,” she said. “I appreciate what you’ve done to help me. But, I think I know now what it was I came here to learn. I’m afraid the resolution of this story is not within the province of psychiatry.”

Peter
watched Maggie very closely, as she seated herself at the small table; she looked injured by the memories that had struggled free. Burned out by an inner fire.

He had insisted they stop at the coffeehouse on the way back from Strater’s office, because he knew the moment she entered her own home the reality of Cody’s absence would fold in around her like an ice mantle, and in the wake of these last revelations, she seemed too frail for that.

He ordered mulled cider for them both, and she sat staring into the mug, pushing the cinnamon stick from side to side, absently, as the steam rose from the crockery cup. She looked vulnerable, and exhausted.

“You were
there
with me, Peter,” she said finally.

“Yes,” he answered. “I saw the danger, clearly, in the labyrinth. It was the test I’d failed—I needed to save you from the same fate.”

She nodded, understanding.

“It’s real, isn’t it, Maggie?” he asked, his voice hoarse with emotion. “Today was the first time I understood its reality.”

“Yes, it’s
real!
Peter. That’s the problem,” she snapped back at him, nearly upending the cider. “Christ! I can
feel
her youth, her vigor, her longing. You
are
Karaden. Ellie
is
Meri-Neyt. But what does that
mean
Peter?” She looked haunted. “And, in God’s name where is it going? There’s some terrible ending to this story . . . I can feel it coming at me, and it scares me to death.”

“I know, Maggie, dear,” he soothed. “I know it does. It frightens me, too.”

They finished their cider and Peter walked her home, but their pervasive sense of impending doom made any conversation they attempted seem superfluous. She didn’t invite him in.

Maggie climbed the stairs to her room; she felt profoundly tired, as if she could sleep for a thousand years.

As she passed Cody’s bedroom, she felt a terrible need to seek solace there. Maggie sat down on the edge of the frilly bed, carefully, fearing to dispel the remembered images that were secreted in this sanctuary. Of a little girl who was beautiful and fey in the manner of princesses in ancient bardic tales. With hair the color of sun-beaten flax, and mysterious gray eyes like the ocean before a summer storm. She heard again in the stillness of the empty room the quicksilver laughter that was full of old wisdom, and saw the shadow of this child who was shy in a Sphinxian way. Like a golden cloud in an imperfect firmament, or a seagull skimming the precarious wave, she was not entirely of this earth.
Why did I not see that you were not from here?
She breathed into the terrible silence.
Nothing as beautiful as you could be from here.

Maggie let the wash of unbearable pain flood through her then, catching the wave, riding it, drowning in it. She lay back against the frilly pillow that still smelled of baby powder, and cried herself to sleep.

The dream sucked, Maggie under and pulled her along in its inexorable tow. She felt herself scooped up by a cosmic whirlwind and cast far out into time/space . . . soaring through the firmament, past stars and planets, into the void.

Oh God, they’re taking me again,
she thought wildly, as a kaleidoscopic reprise of visions began to flash before her altered sight. She saw herself and Cody metamorphose into a dozen incarnations, in many different guises, sometimes male, sometimes female. Life after life dropped before her, like slides in an eternal viewer . . . Druid priestesses tending a sacred oak . . . devoted, but impoverished, husband and wife, in a Welsh fishing village . . . two nuns in a convent, during the Spanish Inquisition . . . pioneer mother and child in early America . . . warrior comrades fighting back to back on varied battlefields. Dozens of lives shimmered dizzyingly in and out of focus, until, finally, Maggie saw the Cody/essence as a Hopi Medicine Woman of high degree, the Maggie/essence as the Grandfather who had taught her medicine ways.

Abruptly, the hypnotic dream faded and Maggie woke up, drenched in sweat, every image alive within her, pulsating, radiating information.
The pattern.
Finally, she could see the pattern.

Always the bond between two souls is absolute . . . always, one is present at the other’s death.

Woe to him who is

alone when he falleth,

for he hath not

another to help him

up.

Ecclesiastes

P
eter and Maggie sat in the Broome Street Bar, two days later, untouched hamburgers on their plates.

“I guess we really have to talk about this, Peter,” she said finally. “Ever since the Regression, I feel afraid to be near you . . . and you obviously feel the same way.” She hesitated. “I don’t know what to do about any of this.”

Peter pushed away the coffee cup he’d been toying with and looked into her face; his own was drawn from sleeplessness.

“I’m sorry, Maggie. I haven’t been much use to you the last couple of days. I’ve been trying to regain my own equilibrium. Who are we to each other? I keep asking myself. Who have I been?” He looked as troubled as she felt.

“You know I went to Strater,” Maggie said, a hint of bitterness in her voice, “thinking that ‘knowing’ Mim’s story would make things clearer, better. But it’s only made things much worse. How can we ever know what’s real, now, Peter? I find myself struggling with feelings about you that
seem
like love. But what if that’s really Mim loving Karaden, not you and me at all? Or what if Mim and Karaden are just phantoms of my imagination, and I’m really just losing my mind?

“I never
wanted
to feel whatever it is I do for you. Peter. Look at me! I can’t even
say
the word ‘love’ where you’re concerned. But I damned well feel
something
out of the ordinary for you, and you feel it, too.” Her voice was tightly controlled.

“I’m going to be painfully honest with you, Peter, because I don’t know what else to be. Whenever we’re together, I find myself wanting to
touch
you . . . to hold you, to be held . . . and to say things I have no right to say . . . and it all feels somehow inevitable. Now, I know it’s tangled up with these
other
lives.” She threw up her hands in a gesture of despair trying to explain.

Peter’s eyes caught hers and held them; tenderness had warmed the craggy features of his face, softening them.

“Maggie, Maggie, don’t you see . . .” he said, reaching across the table for her hands, and holding them fast with his own. “ I
do
love you!
Now,
and maybe then . . .who knows where it began? And, I do believe that you love me. That part is
pure.
Spotless. Nothing to be ashamed of, surely. What we choose to do about our love . . .
that,
I’m afraid, may be another matter, entirely. But for now—for this small moment in eternity. I think we must take care not to let that love weaken us in any way. If we can draw strength from what we feel for each other, then it’s good. If not . . .” He ignored the stares from the other tables.

“Right now, all you can think about is Cody. Nothing else is even remotely relevant. We have two weeks left in which to save her, so every minute has to count. You cannot be distracted by distrusting your own sanity, or by second-guessing whether or not we genuinely love each other. We simply do. Perhaps you must just let that be. Until April 30th everything is secondary to saving Cody. After that . . .” He sighed eloquently.

What he didn’t say was that after April 30th he didn’t expect to be alive. There was no need for her to know that yet; he wasn’t even certain why he felt it to be true, but there was an unshakable sense within him, that all time stopped for Peter Messenguer on April 30th.

Peter took Maggie home and handed her over to Maria with instructions to take good care of her, grateful that the housekeeper had answered the door. Grateful, too, that he hadn’t been alone with Maggie any longer.

He started to walk the wrong way back to his borrowed apartment, then turned and headed for Thirteenth Street. He’d spend the night at the AIDS hospice and sublimate what he was feeling in good work. At least that way, if he didn’t get any sleep tonight, some poor needy soul would benefit from his insomnia.