A Bright House
Chapter 23

When Ray moved through her house to place the freezer bag and its large feather beside the front door, Jenny was struck by the absurd notion that he looked as though he truly belonged there, in her home. When he returned to the kitchen to spread Scott out across the table, some form of clairvoyant autopsy in the scattered photos and birthday cards, Ray looked at her and remarked “he was a very handsome man”... and she thought look who’s talking through a pang with edges so keen they caught at her ribs. A carnal flash memory arrived. It melded the visual of her first orgasm with her only partner in Scott, then segued into a vivid still frame of this Ray Townes between her legs, strong and sweet atop her.

Where did that come from? (and she had been looking at Ray’s strong fingers as he touched several of the old photos) “He was your one and only love?” Jenny struggled away from the lingering visual, surprised at herself, and answered “Yes. Scott lived across the street from my house and was friends with my foster brother...” Another unbidden memory rose up; the levels of trust she had placed within her partner to even begin to arrive at an emotional place where she could fully let go into herself in order to achieve that orgasm. They had been lovers for almost a year. She could almost taste those recollected tears. Not hers. The ones that she kissed from Scott’s beautiful eyes.

Ray slid an old Polaroid across the worn table top, first toward him and then in a push to where Jenny stood to the right in the kitchen doorway. “This picture holds a deep interest for me.” Ray almost whispered, and tapped it with an index finger. Jenny looked down at the group photo; Scott and his buddies from the Chippewa reserve near Scott’s home town. “He’s only about fourteen there” Jenny offered. “That was before I knew him, when he lived in Chatsworth.” Ray eyed the photo for long seconds, tracing an index finger lightly over Scott and one of the young men beside him. “He was close with this group?” Jenny moved to lean slightly over Ray’s shoulder, her eyes falling to his hair, neck.

“Two brothers in particular” she answered. “Gord and George.” Ray tapped the face of he who stood to Scott’s right... “This is Gord.” That he spoke it as a statement of fact was no longer surprising to Jenny, who said simply, “Yes.” Ray turned his head slightly, casting those wolfish orbs across the arc of a shoulder to look at her (she met his gaze evenly then, where the Jenny of three nights prior would have flushed and retreated)... “I am wondering why this other brother, this George, is not in the photo?” Her facial expression reflected the emotive wallop of a deep but obvious realization, instantly followed by the visible processing of its viability within her eyes.

“George... wow. I can’t believe it hasn’t seemed so glaring a thing to me, but he went fishing up the Saugeen river one weekend and was never seen again.” Ray scraped the chair legs around on the floor, pivoted to look straight up at her. Reading the face. Jenny continued; “Scott was sixteen that summer. I remember him telling me, wow, that even George’s boat had disappeared. That was the strangest thing about it. People assumed that he changed his plans and went out into lake Huron...” Ray shook his head slowly, emphatically, feeling something informational that floated through him without the usual visuals. “Do you sense a connection between these two incidents? What does your gut tell you?”

Jenny peered down at the photo. No words came forth. She backed away several steps to lean against the counter, folding her arms in a self hug. The wall clock ticked away their remaining shared hours, louder than she had ever heard it. “Do you know?” Ray turned the chair around to face her again, “how many people go missing each year just in the United States?” She bit her bottom lip and shook her head, meeting his gaze squarely. “Ten million people are reported missing each year, and of that number five percent are never seen again. Do the math; it’s pretty frightening. In the UK, with a much smaller population, estimates of two hundred and fifty thousand people a year... roughly the same percentage that are never heard from again, and in Australia? Three thousand vanish every year. Russia? A hundred and twenty thousand in one year alone with a higher percentage never found...” Jenny interjected, “But how many people are hiding from debt, other people, or - ”

“Lots” Ray spoke firmly with raised volume, dealing with a sudden flash of the empty life spaces where his parents used to be; seeing the final resting place of his father replayed and not liking it. “But there is a five percent mystery here, and it adds up to thousands and thousands of human beings, many of them children, who simply vanish from the face of the earth each and every year.” The clock ticked louder. Jenny couldn’t help but to look over at its face. Ray continued. “Most of the clairvoyant work that I am asked to do revolves around missing persons. Canada is a small population but we still lose thousands of our people, year round, and out where I’m from in the prairies... you would be shocked by the numbers.”

“So... are you suggesting something like... what? Aliens? Secret government agencies conducting experiments?” Ray lifted himself from the chair to walk across the kitchen, where he stopped to look through the glass door at the violated shed. He had felt her eyes upon him differently. Knew that she had reached a place within that was open and direct, very raw, possibly an unconscious energy exchange from Scott to Ray. He felt that were he interested in her that way, were he a man who welcomed physical and emotional intimacy, she would give herself to him fully on this night. Whether or not she knew her own motives wasn’t the point. If it was to be a goodbye act made somehow safe through its details of new acquaintances and abbreviated longevity, he was no one to judge that.

Ray didn’t allow himself to become overly attached to the people in his world; he felt compelled to assist them with his gift of sight but had learned from painful past experiences that getting too close meant awful things. The seeing of illness, death, often specific circumstances and time frames. Decades had taught Ray Townes to become one with his special aspect, even if it meant a martyring of sorts. He gazed out into the dark yard, thought of the huge feather, of Scott and George, of the thousands who simply vanish without a trace... he looked briefly at the woman leaning against her counter. So attractive. Vulnerable. A good soul who coped to the best of her ability with a poor method. She wasn’t like Ray. She could have been loving and living life to its fullest for so many years, had her partner been taken in any number of more traditional ways.

He looked into her open steady gaze, saw and felt the truth in it and briefly marveled at the deftness of a universe that places a man such as he, a rarity, into her home at this time. The one man who would decline an opportunity presented from a very soft place in a hardened woman’s heart. And yes, he wondered often but more so on that night in Jenny’s house on Bright street; what would it do to him emotionally? What would it feel like to walk across the floor, place a hand gently under her hair against that soft neck, and to melt a lifelong yearning kiss into her lips? What devastating power would he experience during those long free falling moments? Would the response of her body be more than he could bear? He had never been inside a woman. It was too easy for him to remember that emotional and physical intimacy inextricably carried its peculiar warning signs, deeper clearer visuals, and more than he could handle. Bodies, he thought for the millionth time... the crude vessels that relay souls from stage to stage.

He looked into Jenny’s gaze and said what felt true and sudden. ”I could love you, you know“... her eyes widened, clock ticking ticking, her eyes shining briefly before dimming into a betrayal of inner disbelief or cynicism. “I don’t know why I just said that” Ray then turned back to the window, replaceing a calm within the darkness out there. “You must remember that I pick up on a lot of what you are thinking, Jenny... but I stand by what I just told you. I know you have a beautiful caring heart. I wanted to help you the second I perceived your sadness at the diner, but had no idea that something this... strange and unexplainable was involved.”

Jenny looked at him in profile, savagely handsome, utterly unique, vaguely but forcefully familiar to her. She processed what he had just spoken and felt the crashing of her heart within its confines. Somehow it had been everything that she wanted and needed to hear and yet it deepened her despair. Would he be another man like so many? Had he picked up on her unconscious invitation only to pounce upon it before taking his leave? She thought those things and banished them immediately. No. This was a different breed. This man was imprisoned by his own special set of circumstances.

She had just been paid a most beautiful compliment. He looked out the window and didn’t move a muscle when Jenny padded across the room to bury her face into the gap between his broad shoulders. Each of her hands came up to rest flat against the blades. He drew a deep breath, stood very still, and she pressed deeply into him, turning to the left so that the tears smeared against his shirt, and for a melting away of time that erased even the sound of her clock, they stood there. Ray breathed evenly, focused on a point of distant visual that wouldn’t move forward to be better perceived. He could feel the warmth of her tears against his back. Her hands shot a soothing heat through his core. Something enormous was taking place and he knew it without name.

Doorways... countless, forever stacked, scattered, layered, tumbling, swinging wide, each one in beckoning to an unknown threshold already crossed but not remembered in the reliving of looped time. Only her heat against him and her pure vulnerable heart. He looked at the yard but could see their combined forms in the glass. A boiling up of conflicting emotions in this our unified vastness, he thought. The pure intuitive. The gifted-afflicted seer; he dared to go against his grain to question that moment’s potential. The very last thing he wished for her, was pain. She’d had more than her share.

If he was reckless there, if it felt so right and good that he stopped thinking clearly even for a few minutes, he could destroy her. Theirs, a reflected unity in the glass made him vanish into duality; wanting to turn around to just wrap her up in the most loving soulful embrace that one human being can give to another, and thinking that he should halt what was possibly happening with a finality born of compassion. Instead, Ray leaned his forehead into the cold glass and breathed. The clock ticked away their shared time and he noted that their breath had joined in perfect unison. He wanted to cry then, so deeply did he feel the presence of his father.

Their embrace ended when Jenny stepped back. She wiped the smear on his shirt and basked in how wonderful it had felt to be able to hug him that way, like an outpouring of poetry or prose from a stunted creative wellspring. He remained facing the window, head pressed to the pane. “That was nice” he said, flooding her with immense relief that what had felt so purely necessary had not been a delusional intrusive act on her part.

“Let me tell you” he spoke so quietly through his weariness after a long emotional day; “This now reality of ours... if you think of a homicide detective questioning a suspect. If you think of the layers of lies that are told repeatedly, gradually broken down and stripped away until truth is finally revealed... if you think of that and then invert the dynamic, you will have what the universe is trying to show us. It is the opposite. We are resistant to the offerings of layered truth, the unfoldment and revealing, or we are woefully limited to the mind’s perceiving of these abundantly evident teachings, tellings, clues...” Jenny stood behind him and listened, rapt, eye-locked on his presence in a house that had been a tomb for so long. Only then did her awareness of the ticking clock return.

“Jenny, there are several reasons why I know that I am supposed to be precisely here at this time. Some I am reluctant to say, maybe out of fear or a want to keep you from harm, and one reason that is screaming out loud.” She listened and instantly reacted to the inflection of his voice, at once ready for something beautiful but braced for anything but...

“Please just go ahead and lift the back of my shirt” he told her. “Lift it up to the top of my shoulder blades, and think of your own intuitive guidance and how it told you to place your hands where you did just moments ago.” Jenny wordlessly did as asked.

She took the bottom of the shirt between her fingers and lifted then pushed it up along his back. He was beautifully muscled and proportioned with skin of a freckled copper. Her thumb tips slid up against him as she lifted the shirt and began to see. First the bottom portion where it started at the mid back over his spine. Then where it curved to the right slightly and ran vertically up into a termination atop his right shoulder blade. Her breath hitched. She held the fabric in a suddenly trembling grip, staring.

“You see?” Ray lifted his head from the window, hands pressed flat against the pane where he had placed them as she followed his instruction. A beautifully rendered tattoo, easily a foot long and finely detailed. Almost indistinguishable from that which they had found inside Jenny’s shed.