Mandy first looked toward the kitchen. She heard some talking on the radio show her Mommy was listening to. That seemed to make her mind up for her. She turned again toward the cat walked down the stairs to the front walk.
Madeleine was very much on alert. She didn’t feel she would have been ‘transported’ here, so to speak, if Mandy were not potentially in danger. But she also didn’t know all the rules for this apparent ghost body yet. She didn’t know just what she could do to help. ‘Thinking’ always seemed to control a lot. Just by thinking of a room sometimes, she was able to just be there. But, she knew that this wasn’t always consistent for her. How could she affect the outcome if her sweet granddaughter was in danger? She hadn’t yet figured out how to affect physical objects yet, although she felt somehow sure that this was possible. She would have to use her thought process. Perhaps she could project her thoughts into another brain. She remembered doing that when she was alive, in her old body, although she hadn’t realized at the time that this was exactly what she had sometimes done. She’d been good at card games with a partner. She and her kids and her sister had often finished one another’s sentences, too. Madeleine watched the child with trepidation, but with a renewed sense of determination.
Mandy threw her ball with a gleeful sound like “fetch,” hoping the kitty would follow it. Rather than run for the ball, the cat ran away from the child, down the porch stairs and into the bushes. Mandy started tottering down the stairs and after the ball. Soon she was distracted by a pretty butterfly in a patch of wildflowers close to the road. “Butterfly!” she said.
Madeleine did some mental calculations, assessing the traffic. It was not heavy this time of day, but cars went awfully fast on this stretch of the road. She waited and hoped for no traffic. She reached for the girl’s arms, but passed right through them. Nothing. It appeared she was made of thought and emotion than substance. However, she sometimes saw or perhaps only sensed herself to have a vaporous form where her old body used to be, as Maddie.
“Mandy go home!” Madeleine thought in panic. As suddenly as she thought it, it seemed she was back in the kitchen, watching Emily drain a glass of red wine, still standing at the kitchen sink, her dishes almost done.
“Your daughter is in danger! Get her!” Madeleine tried yelling at Emily. No response. Then she tried to project the same message to her, using only her thoughts. She also tried to convey the fear she felt for the girl, balancing precariously on the curb. It seemed that her emotions could pierce through Emily directly, and Madeleine felt a jolt of electricity when it felt like the thought, or feeling, had registered.
Emily gasped and dropped the plate on the floor, where it broke into about a hundred tiny pieces. “Mandy!” she cried, and simultaneously ran out the front door.
Suddenly the ghost who had been Madeleine seemed to be back near the curb, watching a bright red pickup truck hurtling its way down the street. Mandy was losing her balance, just about to put her foot on the street at the time that the truck was about to pass the house. What happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. Madeleine felt herself transported into the truck with the teenaged boy wearing a muscle shirt, which barely concealed a heart tattoo, trying to insert a thought into his head. “Watch out, veer to the left, NOW,” she projected. The boy turned white, saw the child, and wrenched his wheel to the left just as Emily scooped up her child.
“Mandy!” Emily screamed, and buried her head in her daughter’s silky hair.
Madeleine felt that she could feel the same mixture of relief, fear, guilt and shock that Emily was feeling. She could not feel blame for her. Parenting, and living, was heard, she knew. The love she felt looking at this mother and daughter, who had so narrowly escaped tragedy, was overwhelming.
Madeleine’s consciousness seemed to lose focus, to fade a bit, until the only thing that she was aware of was a feeling of love and connection. Everything seemed to be crackling with electricity; there were lines connecting everything to everything else, like a magnificent web. Madeleine felt that it was time to go… to be… to return to the welcoming light once more.
