Intersections Read online

  “When the hell did you get a tattoo?” Jeremy said.

  He didn’t like body ink, a fact that I was well aware of when I got mine. “I got it after you pissed away our marriage, Jeremy.”

  “What about the white part of it?” Shannon said.

  “The white part is the yin. That’s the masculine. The hard. The light. I didn’t need masculinity to be complete, and I still don’t.” Or maybe that was what was missing from me—a big white hole that Jeremy had left behind. “What I can’t figure out is what happened to my other tattoo, the one on my shoulder.” I lifted my sleeve to show them bare skin. “I got it after I finished my first half marathon.”

  “What was it?” Shannon said.

  “A shoe.”

  “A shoe?” they said in unison.

  “Yeah, a fucking shoe. The shoe I wore when I finished the race. It was a good shoe.” I kicked my heel across the sewer and it bounced right back. “Better than this goddamn thing.”

  “Maybe sometimes a tattoo scars your body and soul,” Shannon said, “and other times the tattoo only adorns your body.”

  Those words sat for a while.

  No one said anything until Shannon finally looked at Jeremy and asked, “Do these sewers run all through the neighborhood?”

  He nodded.

  “Then we need to go east toward Tara’s house.” She filled him in on our plan to board a plane and bypass the spiritual traffic jam here on Earth. She finished with, “So, are you in?”

  “Of course,” he said. “I mean, so long as that’s okay with the ex.”

  They both stared at me. I shrugged. “If you can help sure, sure. I mean, who doesn’t want to spend eternity with their ex-husband?”

  He smiled.

  Soon we were moving through the sewers, literally walking on water. Jeremy stayed at the rear, and we stopped occasionally so Shannon could poke her head out of a storm drain to get her bearings. We stopped and ducked whenever a herd of Shadys passed overhead.

  At one point, when we were walking through a particularly dark patch of sewer, Jeremy said, “You remember that time a snake popped out of your dashboard?”

  I grinned. “Yeah.”

  “Get out,” Shannon said.

  He nodded. “True story. We were out on Herr Road in this Dodge Ram van she used to drive, middle of nowhere. All the sudden, she screams like a banshee and slams the brakes and hops out of the van.”

  “It was the freakiest thing,” I said. “The dashboard had this pale green illumination. I looked down, and the greenish shadows started . . . slithering. I thought maybe it was some kind of acid flashback, but then I realized a goddamn snake was crawling out of my dashboard.”

  “Snakes don’t have legs,” she pointed out. “They can’t crawl.”

  I ignored her. “The damn thing must’ve wiggled up in there while I was parked.”

  Jeremy laughed. “We tried like hell to get the damn thing out, but it wouldn’t budge. Had to drive the whole way back to town knowing that it was up in there somewhere. It was creepy as hell. That’s what this reminds me of. It’s like we’re just waiting for the shadows to come alive.”

  “Nice thought,” I told him.

  “The more I think about what’s happening in the sky,” Jeremy said after a long while, “the more this makes sense. I mean, why drug or distract the population when it’s just as easy to steal their souls?”

  “And here we go,” I said, looking back at him.

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Jeremy. Go on. Enlighten us poor bleating sheep as to how this is all some big conspiracy orchestrated by multinational corporations. Or is it shadow governments? Or the Illuminati?”

  “I don’t know who it is, Molly, but let’s stop and think about this.” He gestured wildly with his hands as he talked—an old habit that started back when our marriage was collapsing. “Clearly, there’s an afterlife. We’re proof of that. So it’s not a stretch to assume that reincarnation is a real possibility. Our souls pass through this Light and are somehow upcycled into new souls. However those souls pass back to Earth, it’s safe to say that if the entrance to the Light is blocked, likely the exit is blocked as well. If no old souls are getting to the other side, then no new souls are getting to the earth. It explains a lot. The current level of apathy. The decline in morality. The rise in mass shootings. Reality TV. It’s all because new generations are lacking souls—or at least quality souls.”

  I shook my head. “Well, I’m glad to see some things never change. You’re still batshit crazy.”

  “Actually, he’s got a point,” Shannon said. “That’s not too far off from what you were saying earlier—about the Earth being turned into a trash heap for junked souls.”

  “Stay out of this,” I told her.

  “Don’t yell at her, Molly, when you’re really mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad at you, Jeremy. Being angry at you got old years ago. I did that for a long time, and eventually realized it wasn’t worth the energy. I’m not mad at you anymore. Now . . . now I’m just sick of you.”

  He stiffened and nodded. “I’m sorry you feel that way. I understand why. I hate what happened . . . what I did to us. I was scared, Molly. We had this perfect home and I had this perfect job and there was all this pressure. Do you know I used to wake up every night around one in the morning, heart racing in my chest?” His hands flailed again, and he pounded on his heart. “I’d be covered in sweat and I’d lie next to you and watch you sleep, terrified that something was going to ruin everything we had. Eventually I just tired of being anxious—of being exhausted. I let the voices on the radio fill me with righteous anger. It was better to be pissed off than frightened all the time. At least the outrage made me feel stronger. So, I embraced that hate when I should’ve been embracing you. I’m sorry. It was my fault. I fucked us up.”

  I stepped toward him. My anger soured into sadness. Tears welled in my eyes. “I’m sorry, Jeremy. I should’ve realized you were hurting. I . . . I didn’t know. I mean, I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know what. Or why. I just wanted to be happy, and it was easy to ignore anything that didn’t fit with that.”

  Our souls collided. He hugged me tight, and I buried my face in the crook of his neck. I wished I could smell his musky scent. My hands came around his waist, and I could tell he was fighting back tears. Then we were both crying, and salty bits of ectoplasm squirmed through the air. The places where we touched tingled, and it was easy to lose myself in the comfort of another. I massaged his shoulders and pulled back so I could look him in the eyes. Our auras glowed with golden light.

  “When did you realize all of this—about your anger?” I asked him.

  “It was a long walk from Cincinnati. I had a lot of time to think. And something about dying—it opened my mind.”

  My lips quivered, and I remembered that they were only half covered in lipstick. He didn’t seem to mind. I got lost in the moment. He leaned in for a kiss. My hands moved to his head—either to stop him or pull him in, I wasn’t sure which—but he grabbed my wrists. His eyes darted toward Shannon. When I looked at her, she was crying too.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I went to her and held her while she cried, but all the while, I was watching Jeremy. Shannon sobbed against my shoulder and I didn’t know what to do but pat her back. I considered asking her what she was sorry for, but it didn’t seem to matter. Our touch points tingled, like walking on a foot that had fallen asleep. The sensation was on the verge of orgasmic, and I wondered if she felt the same thing. Her tears triggered my own. All the while, Jeremy could barely look at me.

  “Thank you,” I mouthed to him.

  He nodded.

  A chill passed over me, and I knew the Shadys were close. I whispered to Shannon, “You have to be quiet, dear. They’re coming.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry . . .”

  We sat together, raw and exposed while the dark spirits passed overhead. When