“That’s okay,” he said gently. “Don’t worry about it.”
The room grew quiet. She was looking down at her hands as they rested one on top of the other on her lower abdomen. They were still inside the pockets of the sweatshirt jacket, so she stared at the grey material.
“What’s making this hard …” she started tentatively, “… is … that before we discuss Conor or Alan, I want to tell you about something else. Because it’s informed my whole life … you need to know, if you’re going to understand what’s happening. But I don’t know how to start telling you.”
“That’s all right,” James said. “Take your time. The pace is yours. There’s no hurry.”
“It’s just, well, more that I’ve never really told anybody about it.” She frowned. “No, that’s wrong. I have. I’ve told quite a lot of people, actually. But never in a context like this. Never in a way that acknowledges its legitimate place in my life. Never truthfully, from beginning to end.” She shrugged apologetically. “That’s what’s actually kept me so long from coming in. I just can’t figure out how to start this without making everything sound crazy. Yet, at the same time I know I’ve got to. Because what if I really did lose Alan? Or Morgana? Or Conor? That can’t happen. So I’ve got to start with telling you about this one thing, because otherwise, nothing else will make sense.”
James nodded.
There was total silence, so complete that the subtle noises of the outer office and waiting room flowed into the room like an incoming tide.
Laura finally took a very deep breath and let it out with measured slowness. “It starts the summer I was seven. In my home town, which is west of here in the Black Hills. In June. Early evening, maybe about 7 pm. I was walking alone along this little dirt path that ran from the end of our street, which is called Kenally Street, through an empty lot that bordered the lake and then out to meet the next street over, which is Arnott Street. It was just a kids’ path through a vacant lot that belonged to an old man named Mr Adler. You know the kind. We used the path as a shortcut to school and as a quick way to get down to the pier at the end of Arnott Street.
“Anyway, that particular evening we’d had thundery showers in the late afternoon. When the clouds finally parted, the sun was left hanging just above this low, humpbacked mountain that everyone calls the Sugarloaf. I was walking directly into the sunlight and I recall looking up at it and wondering why it was that you could look directly at the sun when it is that low in the sky and it doesn’t hurt your eyes.
“Then just to my right, I caught motion in my peripheral vision, stopped, turned my head and found myself still sunblind. I couldn’t see clearly for a moment or two, but when I could, there was this woman standing there.”
Laura paused and drew in a deep breath.
“She was like no one I’d ever seen before. Not even in my dreams. She was in her twenties, tall, with broad, bold features and dusty-coloured skin. Her hair was a soft black colour like charcoal, thick and very, very straight. It hung loose just past her shoulders. This caught my attention straightaway, because this was in the early 60s, before the Flower Power generation, so women wore short Doris Day ’dos or Jackie Kennedy bouffants. If their hair was longer, it was done up in a chignon or French roll. I’d never seen a grown woman who had her hair loose and unstyled.
“The other really noticeable thing was her muscles. She was quite thin but she had these taut, prominent muscles. I remember thinking that if I reached out and touched her, her flesh would feel hard like my brother’s, not soft and mushy like Ma’s.
“More than anything else, though, the feature that defined her most was her eyes. They were deep-set, beneath dark, ungroomed eyebrows, and they were the most extraordinary colour. A light, light grey that towards the edges of the iris was vaguely yellowed, like the eyes of a wolf.
“All her clothes were creamy white. The top was loose and blousy and had an elaborate design embroidered down the front and on the cuffs, but the embroidery was white on white, so you couldn’t actually tell what it was without looking closely. Her pants were like these baggy shorts boys wear now that end just below the knees, but they were made of the same white woven material as her top. On her feet she was wearing Roman-style sandals, the kind that lace up over the ankles.
“I remember staring at her because she looked so strange. And also because she looked really very beautiful in a wild sort of way. She stared right back at me. Not discreetly, the way adults usually look at people they’d interested in. She stared. The way young kids stare at each other. She had this bewildered expression on her face, as if she were as startled to see me there trotting along the path through Adler’s vacant lot as I was to see her.
“That moment of staring felt like forever to me. We just stood, locked in one another’s gaze. I wasn’t frightened of her at all. If anything, I felt a wary excitement.
“Finally she turned away and started moving towards the corner of the lot. There wasn’t a way out onto the street there. Just an old, untended lilac hedge. The lilacs were tall and scraggly but even so, you still couldn’t get through them. I never bothered to wonder why she was going that way. All I knew was that she was getting away and I couldn’t let that happen. I had to follow her. So I did.”
Laura stopped.
James raised his eyebrows. “And?”
“My next memory was of getting hit by crab apples that my foster brother was throwing. When I looked around, I was standing in the alley at the other end of the path. Over by the gate into our backyard. This was more than half a block away from where I’d seen the woman.
“I remember looking down and seeing the knee-deep weeds in the alley, seeing their colour. They were that pale yellow everything goes when it is baked dry in the summer heat, and there was hard, rutted soil beneath them. For a moment I wondered if this woman had magicked me there because it was quite a way away from the path through the empty lot. I was seven and still hopeful about things like fairies and magic. But I wasn’t a naïve kid. I think I already knew by then that those things didn’t really exist. I was also experienced enough with my imagination to know that it did. This wouldn’t have been the first time I’d become so engrossed in playing an imaginary game that I’d lost track of where I was and ended up somewhere else.”
“So you recognized seeing this woman as an imaginary experience?” James asked.
“Oh yes. Definitely yes. I’m not talking about aliens or the paranormal or anything like that. I imagined her. Real as she looked to me in Adler’s lot, I knew even then that if I’d reached my hand out, I could never have touched her. I knew she had come from inside me.”
“So what do you think happened to you during that period between seeing her and your ending up at the gate into your backyard?” James asked.
“Simple. I’d followed her. I walked into another world that evening,” Laura said quietly. “A world inside my head. Nowhere else and I knew it was nowhere else. But it was another world, nonetheless, and no less real for being in there instead of out here. I experienced it with immense clarity. As vividly, as vibrantly as I can see this room around us right now.”
She looked directly at James. “Does that sound crazy?”
James smiled gently. “No, not crazy. Many children are gifted with astonishing imaginations and can create some very detailed fantasies.”
“It was astonishing all right. But it proved to be much more than a child’s fantasy because it didn’t end there with my childhood. That’s why it’s so hard to talk about. Because there is a type of craziness about it and I do know that.” She studied her fingers a moment. “But I also need to tell you about it. Because that night on the path through Adler’s lot has influenced everything that’s ever happened