Chapter 12
990 Words
12
I was so friggin cold again. I have to figure out the clothes thing.
But Halli was ready for me, my same outfit laid out.
“You just disappeared,” Halli told me. “Left your clothing in a heap.”
Red was beside himself to see me. His whole body wagged, from shoulders to tail. I kneeled in front of him and gave him a big hug.
“Happy to see you, too, boy.”
It was nighttime there, same as at home. Clear sky, brilliant stars. I tried to find the constellations I know—Orion’s belt, Cassiopeia, the Big Dipper—but either I wasn’t looking in the right places or they weren’t there.
Which was an interesting thing to think about—did they have a completely different star system? I’d have to add that to my list of things to investigate.
While I pulled on Halli’s warm layer of clothes and wrapped myself in the thick sleeping bag she’d brought out from the tent, Halli boiled water and made us hot chocolate.
“Did you know I’d come back?” I asked, gratefully accepting the mug.
“I hoped.”
What a nice thing to hear.
We were by the campfire again. So she didn’t have to go back out to that cliff to duplicate the experience.
I asked her what she did.
“I meditated a couple of different times today,” she said. “First right after you left—”
“I tried that, too! Why didn’t it work?”
But I knew why: I was too agitated.
Halli was more generous. “Maybe it was too soon. Maybe we both needed a little time.”
I petted the dog, who had cozied up right beside me again. I could get used to that. I’ve never really been a dog person—or a cat person or any other kind of animal—but if this is what it was like, I was all for it.
I took a sip of cocoa. It was better than any I’ve ever tasted in my life.
Or maybe the whole experience made everything better. It’s hard to express just how happy I was to be back there. I had done it again. And Halli had, too.
On purpose.
Maybe it should be obvious that a parallel version of me would want me around, but it wasn’t obvious to me. I’ve gotten used to the kind of friendship Lydia offers: fine to have me around, also fine not to. We don’t hang out every day. We don’t even talk every day. She and her family live about two blocks over, but unless Lydia and I are at school or doing something like the barbeque earlier tonight, we don’t really make the effort to see each other.
I don’t know how other friends do it, but that’s what works for us.
So to have Halli actively want to hang out with me—twice in the same day—well, that was something new. And very special to me.
“I feel like I should ask you a million questions all at once,” I said. “In case I disappear again.”
“Why did that happen before?”
I explained to her about the phone, and about the steps I’d taken this time to make sure nothing would interrupt me.
“A noise was all it took?” Halli asked. She stared into the fire for a moment and considered that. “Interesting.”
“Well doesn’t it make sense?” I said. “If I was in a deep meditation before, then anything that would bring me out of it had to interrupt the signal.”
“What did it sound like?” Halli asked. “The phone ringing. Was it loud or did it sound more muffled, like it was far away?”
“It sounded . . . I don’t know, regular. Like it was right beside me, which it was.”
“And when you woke up,” Halli said, “what were you wearing?”
“Same thing as when I got here.”
“Interesting,” she said again.
Obviously I wasn’t the only one trying to puzzle through how the whole thing worked.
“Do you have a theory?” I asked.
“Maybe. Let me add a little wood first.”
She built up the campfire while Red and I sat watching. Sparks danced from the center as Halli plopped on a nice fat log. She used a stick to stir the coals underneath.
“I told you I’d been trying to contact my grandmother,” Halli said. “You probably thought that was strange.”
I saw no reason to lie. “Yes.”
“She is dead,” Halli said. “I saw the body. I know she’s not coming back.”
“Then why?” I asked. “How did you think you could speak to her?”
“Do you know anything about the ancient yogis? In India?”
“Not really.” Lydia may have talked about that here and there, but it was never anything I paid attention to.
“If you read the histories,” Halli said, “you find all sorts of reports of yoga masters—the saints and gurus—who reappeared to their students after death. I thought maybe . . .”
She stirred the fire again. “I don’t know. It was worth a try.”
“Was she a teacher?”
“She was my teacher,” Halli said.
I didn’t feel like I really had a grasp on our conversation. One minute we were talking about why I kept showing up places wearing just my boxers and a shirt, and the next we were talking about Indian saints and gurus reappearing after they were dead.
“You don’t understand,” Halli guessed.
I smiled and shook my head. “Not at all.”
“We were in India, Ginny and I. We used to go there every year—I was born there. In a little town called Halli.”
That explained the name. Mine would have been Yuma.
“So what were your parents doing there,” I asked, “in India?”
“Saving the world, of course. But then they came to their senses and went back home and left me with Ginny.”
“They just . . . left you?”
“Yes.”
Wow. I really didn’t get her life.
“So Ginny and I lived there for a while, and then we started moving around a lot, but we always came back to India once a year. She loved it there—we both did.”
“I’ve only been to two other states in my whole life,” I told Halli, a little embarrassed at my lack of adventurousness.
“And another universe,” she pointed out.
“Oh.” I smiled. “Yeah.”
“I love traveling,” Halli said, “but I also think it’s good to stay in one place sometimes. That’s what I’ve been doing lately.”
She added another log to the fire. The thing was blazing now.
“So, there we were last year,” she continued, “enjoying our month in India, and one day Ginny went off to her early morning meditation and she never came back. I didn’t know she was dead until someone came to tell me that afternoon. And I was too sick to go see her body until the next day.”
“Sick? What was wrong with you?”
“Oh. Ginny poisoned me. So I wouldn’t follow her.”
- Writer
