“You know me pretty well, don’t you? I won’t. I promise.”
“I should know you. I raised you all these years. Bye.”
“Bye.”
I carried Daniel back into the kitchen and mixed some baby cereal with strained pears. Daniel ate about half the bowl, then pushed the spoon away.
“Full? Okay, sonny boy, I’m going to put you in your swing again. Let’s see if you can stay quiet while Mommy makes some calls.”
He didn’t protest, content and full. I dialed the three new numbers. One job was already filled, but the others were still open, and I arranged interviews for both. One was for a clerk typist position at a manufacturer in the far northeast. The other was the junior medical secretary job at Hahnemann Hospital off Broad Street in the heart of downtown Philadelphia. Their personnel officer said they would train me, if I proved a good candidate in their other test requirements. I liked the idea of working in the health field.
On impulse, I decided to also call back the number for the Girl Friday position. It couldn’t hurt to have a third interview, in case the first two fell through. I snuck a wary glance at Daniel as I dialed. He was engrossed in his key rattle, ignoring me.
I intended to explain the earlier interruption to the woman supervisor I’d spoken to, or tried to speak with, before. But now the receptionist cut short my request to be transferred to the woman, explaining that they’d had too many responses to the ad, had booked enough interviews, and weren’t scheduling any more at present.
As I hung up the phone, I noticed my son’s absolute disinterest in my job search, as opposed to his early morning caterwauling. I offered him the leftover fruit and cereal mix. He gobbled it up and yawned.
“Tired, sweetie? So am I. Come on. Let’s go upstairs.”
I left my mother a note: “Got two interviews. One on Friday at Hahnemann Hospital! The other on Monday at a paper manufacturer on Bustleton Avenue. I’m upstairs, getting Daniel ready for his nap. Leigh Ann.”
Daniel gibbered and cooed on the way up, and let out infant sighs as he lay in his crib, preoccupied with a thorough study of his fingers and sleeper-clad feet.
I rested on my bed beside his crib, watching him, the house quiet, the ticking of Ginnie’s clock audible in the stillness.
I fell asleep before the baby did.
CHAPTER 12
Mists swirl around me, white against a moderate blue background that waivers in hue, slightly lighter, slightly darker. The clouds, if clouds they are, drift by me. Yet my feet stand firmly on something soft but solid.
In the distance I spy Terence, his blond hair, white poet’s shirt, brown pants and boots cutting a sharp contrasting figure against the blue and white ether. His back is to me. He turns and looks at me, as if just noticing my arrival. Then he turns away, as if denying my presence, walking on.
“Terence!”
I want to run, to catch up, and suddenly I am there, right behind him. I reach out and grab his shoulder. “Wait!”
He faces me silently, sullenly.
“Why were you running away?”
He doesn’t answer for a minute. When he finally does, his words spew out in a pettish miserable torrent. “You and that bloody downsider! Prying into other people’s lives. Now he’s trying to destroy my soul as well as yours. Well, you can play in his bloody pit all you like. I’m climbing out, fast as I can. Leave you behind, I swear it. Let Quatama figure out how to rescue your bloody arse if you fall too low. I’m not your fucking Prince Charming. Smear your own face with the ashes from the fire. I won’t have it. None of it. I’m off the job. Ta!”
He turns to leave. I try to push in front of him. The atmosphere in this void feels thick, as if I’m under water when I deliberately try to move, yet when I think about, desire a movement or action, it occurs so fluidly, it seems to happen almost simultaneously. I give up trying to physically catch his retreating figure, and simply concentrate, imagining appearing in front of him, bringing him up short.
“Leigh Ann, please stop that! I want to go.” He glares at me; I have jolted him, materializing so close to him, we nearly collide. “You have plenty of other spirit guides. I’ve no doubt of that, having learned about you, my girl. You’ll do fine without me. Now please let me pass.”
“You’re angry. It’s about your music, isn’t it? Why didn’t you tell me you had other compositions?”
“Other composi . . . !” He sputters, unable to even complete the word. “You are talking about my life blood, my magnum opus, the gems I seduced from the Muse after I recovered from the depression caused by my critics trashing any pleasure I’d had in the debut of my first record. None of my peers thought my work had merit. But that record was like glass compared to the diamonds of my final compositions. And I hoarded them, like a child with a wondrous secret, holding back to dazzle my mates with three new musical triumphs in one fell swoop!” He lapses back to silence, sucks in a breath, and shivers as if chilled. “No one knew they existed but Cecily. Bloody beautiful Cecily. I told her not to tell another soul. I planned to tape them after our return to London from Blackpool. Just shut myself in with the piano and the recorder, put in all the orchestral parts of the symphony, finish it, then record the sonata’s interweaving movements, and finally, get my nocturne, short but excruciatingly seductive, down on tape! I’d only dreamt of creating music like this before, Leigh Ann. That recording you think so highly of equalled my metaphorical toddler steps, learning to walk as a composer before discovering I could run! And that bastard, that absolute bastard, saying the bloody bitch destroyed it all!” He lifts his hands helplessly to me. “I only had one set of it all, written in musical script. My symphony, my sonata and my poor little nocturne. I tucked them all in a large envelope and stuck it inside the piano bench before we left for seaside. So she destroyed them. Cecily destroyed them.” He heaves a sigh. “Not that I couldn’t recreate the music, upside in the afterlife, you know. But you want to leave your greatest work . . . ” He huffs out another sigh. “. . . in the plane of life you created it on. I was waiting. I thought perhaps Cecily would have shown them to my publisher after I died. It’s been three years, hasn’t it? On Earth?”
I can read the resignation in his eyes, his posture. “Three new compositions? Lost?”
“Three long leaps in my musical virtuosity. Gone forever, it appears. Not to be part of my scant legacy on Earth.”
I lift my hand and rest it on his shoulder. He glances at it, unsure of my intentions, but allows it to remain there. “You were eavesdropping on Bael’s taunts this morning. I thought you had left. Bael said you had, but you were listening in.”
Now he does move, dislodging my hand as he paces to the left. “I went off into the living room. But the words of that wondrous fallen angel of yours were meant as much for my ears as for yours. He means to crush my soul, to ship me to the spiritual boondocks. Away from you, no doubt. And he said my final works were lost, didn’t he? Said they would never be recovered. That Cecily had been particularly spiteful.”
“Was she?”
“I . . . umm . . . didn’t attend my funeral nor look in on friends and relatives after I drowned. I really don’t know. I met Patrick shortly after I went through the death process, the transition. He’d been on the upper planes some twenty to thirty
