Too Near the Edge Read online

  For me, that much style is usually way too time-consuming, which is why I had on old khaki shorts and a ragged Earth Day 5K tee shirt, while I pictured Elisa sitting on her deck looking gorgeous in some perfectly fitted tank top and shorts, sipping herbal iced tea and enjoying the foothills view while making her pre-party phone calls.

  But I can clean up and look almost as sophisticated or sexy as she does when I want to. I felt the urge to do it for that night’s party. I resolved to spend some extra time getting ready, not just to feel well-dressed next to Elisa, but also because her parties draw exciting people. Pablo would be at work, so I’d be on my own. Maybe I’d meet a cute guy who’d take my work seriously.

  Chapter 2

  The watering took me over an hour. Time-consuming home-and-lawn-maintenance is a clear downside of my house, which was built in 1872 by an early settler whose family raised fruits, vegetables and flowers on the land that is now Settlers Park in west Boulder. It’s the sort of place real estate ads today describe as a “historic stone farmhouse,” which is code for sloping floors, small closets, and aging plumbing. But for me, this house is as comfortable as my favorite jeans and fits me just as perfectly. I love the cozy rooms with hardwood floors and mahogany doors. And I especially love the location, nestled against the Boulder foothills and acres of what is known in Colorado as open space.

  My grandmother, Martha Donnelly, who was once a prominent Boulder artist, is the actual owner of the house. She’s been gradually losing her mind to Alzheimer’s disease for the past twelve years, and now at age 87 lives at Shady Terrace Nursing Home. I love her dearly. Watching her essence be eaten away by this mind-snatching disease is so excruciating that some days I’m glad Grampa isn’t here to see any more of it, even though I miss him deeply.

  Gramma and Grampa bought the house when they first moved to Boulder back in 1950 when it was a small college town of only 20,000 people. Grampa fell in love with the big garden area, and for Gramma, the stone carriage house in back, which became her studio, was perfect.

  Starting at age nine, I spent every summer with them in this house. Boulder always felt more like home to me than Topeka, Kansas, where I lived the rest of the year. I remember those summers as quiet times where the days slid by harmoniously—so different from the sharp bickering I was used to at home.

  To this day, the smell of oil paint in the studio takes me back to those summer mornings when I painted there with Gramma. And the cool feel of the flagstone patio on my bare feet recalls the afternoons Grampa and I spent there surrounded by the gardens and shade trees. We talked about everything from Egyptian pyramids to tomato plants. He taught philosophy at the University, and he was as curious by nature as I am. No matter what I came up with, he took an interest. Some days we ended up at the library, where we spent hours looking for answers to my questions, like how bees know which flowers have the best nectar, or why Colorado has mountains but Kansas doesn’t.

  Grampa was the one person in my life who I could talk to about anything. I loved everything about him. He’s my model for what a man should be and I’ve yet to meet his match. I miss him terribly. In some way his plants seem like part of him, so taking good care of them is important. It’s a lot of work, but spending time in his gardens brings to mind fond memories of him and our times together.

  I got interested in grief therapy when I struggled with my own grieving after Grampa died. I was a doctoral student in clinical psychology then, and barely managed to stick with it in the face of my overwhelming sorrow. I knew Grampa would never want me to quit, so I learned to focus on my positive memories of him to keep me going. It worked, and inspired me to go on for extra training to become a certified grief counselor. Death fascinates me because it’s both mysterious and inevitable. Helping people cope with it has become the focus of my practice. It’s a universal issue, although most people don’t like to think about it.

  My current approach to grief therapy isn’t the most traditional one, but it’s not unique either. After my first few years in practice, I moved away from steering people through the stages of the grief process. I found that what causes people the most pain is a need to resolve unfinished business with their dead loved ones So I began using a process that helps them work through bottled-up feelings and complete their relationship with the person who has died.

  Sounds pretty reasonable so far, right? Well here’s where it gets a little unusual—some would say weird or even flaky. The Contact Project is where I help people see and actually talk with dead family members or friends using a process I discovered while trying to reach Grampa after he died. Yes, I know. Sounds kind of wavy-gravy, but that isn’t me. I may not follow mainstream methods, but my project is respectable. It’s not like I’m telling fortunes over the internet or running some 900 psychic hotline scam.

  The contact process doesn’t always work, and people rarely get what they expect, but many get some satisfying communication. Most of them can only make contact once or sometimes twice, so it’s not like they have the deceased back for nightly conversation. But overall it helps.

  The exception to the one-or-two-contacts rule so far is Tyler, who now visits me whenever he gets a notion to do it. He was the first dead person I ever talked to, and oddly he was someone I didn’t even know. He showed up a couple of years ago while I was trying for about the hundredth time to contact Grampa, who had been dead for five years. Grampa was very interested in the whole area of life after death, which he hoped existed but deep down didn’t really believe in. He was particularly fascinated by Harry Houdini. Grampa told me many times that Houdini had made a pact with a friend that, if he died first, he would contact this friend from beyond the grave.

  According to my grandfather, Houdini never contacted his friend. This, of course, made Grampa even more skeptical. Nevertheless, he still had hope. He told me he would contact me if he could. After three years passed with no messages from my grandfather, I decided perhaps I had to put some effort into reaching him in order for it to happen. I started reading about methods of reaching the dearly departed. And eventually I began trying out some of the less bizarre approaches.

  The method that eventually brought me face to face with a dead person involved constructing a homemade “apparition chamber.” In an upstairs bedroom I mounted a four-foot square mirror on the wall about three feet above the floor. I surrounded it with a black velvet curtain hung from the ceiling, using a curved curtain rod to create a small curtained booth. Inside the booth, I put an easy chair with its legs removed and a block under the front to incline the chair slightly backward. This allowed me to sit in the chair and look into the mirror without seeing my own reflection. When I sat in the chair and gazed into the mirror all I saw was a pool of darkness.

  The theory behind this is that throughout history people have reported seeing visions in reflective surfaces such as clear pools of water, polished brass cauldrons, crystals, and mirrors lit in the midst of blackness. The apparitions appear as the viewer gazes into the clear dark pool.

  I had actually reached a point where I thought I might be getting close to Grampa when Tyler appeared for the first time. I felt strangely lightheaded, looked up to re-orient myself, and saw a blond, blue-eyed guy in a faded gray “Never Stop Surfing” tee shirt, black nylon shorts and gray rubber sandals. He sat there in the mirror, cross-legged, like he was ready for yoga class to begin. I nearly fell off my chair! And he looked as surprised as I was.

  “Yo! What’s up, dude?” he said.

  “Um…who are you and what are you doing here?” I asked, taking a deep breath.

  “I’m Tyler. Where’s here? I’m clueless.”

  I had no idea where to begin. “Are you dead?”

  “I guess.”

  I wondered how he could not know whether he was dead or not, but pursuing that seemed rude even to a highly curious person like me. So I moved on. “How did you get here?”

  “Surfing the mean everlasting waves. And then I bailed.”

&nb
sp; That fit with his tee shirt, but otherwise I was more confused than ever. “Wow! I was trying to reach my grandfather, James Donnelly. He died in 1996. Do you know him?”

  “It’s not like that there. Knowing people is totally weird.”

  “Look, I know it’s not your fault, but this is pretty frustrating,” I said. “I was following the instructions for reaching dead people, and then you show up, and you don’t even know whether you’re dead or not. Let’s see whether I can touch you.”

  As I reached out to grab his hand, I felt a sharp tingle between us and he was gone. Nothing in the room looked any different than it had before Tyler showed up. But I felt absolutely positive he had been there, that he was not a figment of my imagination. I was pretty sure that if I were going to imagine someone, it wouldn’t have been Tyler.

  I wanted to find out more about Tyler that day, so I stayed in my apparition chamber, gazed intently into the mirror and tried to conjure him up again. This was the first of many failed attempts to get Tyler to show up on demand. As I got to know him, I quickly learned that like many of us, Tyler does not respond well to directives. Over all the time I have known him, he has made a point of appearing when it suited him rather than when I’ve tried to summon him.

  I’ve learned to take Tyler seriously, even though he has an annoying way of giving me instructions that are mostly confusing. I don’t take well to being told what to do either, so I more or less ignored his suggestions in the beginning. But last year I got into a jam I would have avoided if I’d taken his advice, and to my surprise he pretty much got me out of it, so ever since then, I’ve paid attention.

  Tyler isn’t someone I knew when he was alive, nor is he someone summoned by one of my clients. In fact, I don’t know anyone who knew him. I assume he did exist, but even though I’ve Googled him and done other types of web searches, I haven’t been able to get enough information about his earthly life to look him up in records or anything like that.

  Talking to a dead person is different from what you might imagine. Of course the dead person has all the power. After all, they’ve been where you are, but you haven’t been where they are. They come and go at will—that’s their will—and they give out remarkably little information. There’s so much we want to know from them, but they don’t seem to find that important. Tyler, for example, brushes off most of my questions.

  “Can you see us here on earth going about our lives?” I asked him once.

  “We could, but it’s totally boring,” he said.

  “Well, what are you doing that’s so interesting then?”

  “It’s awesome. Endless summer. Riding the big waves every day.”

  I expect we could go on and on like that—but usually his visits are short so we don’t. I figure Tyler finds it too tedious to talk to a living person at any length.

  Until yesterday, I hadn’t told anyone about Tyler. As a licensed psychologist with a private grief-therapy practice, I’m more than a little touchy about being seen as unprofessional, eccentric, or, even worse, fraudulent. But last night, in a fit of intimacy that came on as I gazed into Pablo’s adorable dark-brown eyes, I spilled the whole thing. He’s a police detective, so it’s his job to be skeptical. But he’s also an artist, and he meditates, and he can be a tender, sensitive guy. Except when he isn’t. Like last night.

  “Cleo, it’s easy to imagine something that you really want to have happen,” he said. “Some of the stories we hear at the station are even more incredible than this. But use your common sense. Contacting dead people is not very likely. And, if by some miracle you were able to reach someone, wouldn’t it be your grandfather? Why would some dead surfer dude be hanging around visiting you?”

  “I don’t know why Tyler visits me. But I do know I’m not making him up. And I have actually reached Grampa once, but I never told you because I was afraid you would say I imagined it. Silly me!”

  “Okay, Cleo. I thought we agreed not to talk about this contact stuff. You know how I feel about it.” Pablo knew about this aspect of my grief therapy practice. It’s not like I keep the Contact Project a secret. But he has never approved of me helping my clients get in touch with dead people. Basically he thinks it’s a situation where grief-stricken people delude themselves into visualizing the person they want to reach.

  “You’re right. I never should have told you about Tyler.” I was mad at myself for telling him, but even more mad at him for not taking me seriously. “Come on Pablo, be a little bit open-minded. I thought you were trained to look at all the facts. Couldn’t you at least consider that what I’m describing has actually happened?”

  “Facts! What facts?” Pablo circled my living room like a dog in need of a walk. His eyes, no longer so adorable, bored holes in my head. “I’ve tried to be understanding about this ‘new direction’ in your grief therapy practice. But you’re right, I’m trained to look at facts, and I don’t see any here. And it doesn’t help my standing in the department that I hang out with someone who talks to spirits.”

  Our debate continued in that vein for a while, tensions rising. Finally, I reached the end of my patience. “Out,” I screamed, pointing at the door. “I can’t imagine why I ever thought a policeman would understand.”

  “I understand a lot more than you think I do,” Pablo said just before he slammed the door.

  As if I needed reassurance Tyler was real, he appeared that Saturday evening when I wasn’t even in the apparition chamber. I was in my bedroom getting ready for Elisa’s party, deciding between a soft cotton brown and black batik pants outfit or an aqua and white floral print linen sundress. The pants outfit won. It’s one of my favorites, because I think it makes me look taller. The light was dim, and I was doing a final check on my appearance in the oversized Mexican mirror that hangs over my dresser, when I felt the lightheadedness. I turned to sit on the bed, but before I could move toward it, I saw Tyler lounging on it. I wanted to be careful not to scare him off, so I slowly and quietly sat down on the floor.

  “You’re back,” I said.

  “Duh!” Tyler replied.

  “I’ve been trying to reach you all week, but I couldn’t do it.”

  “Hey, chill. I’m right here.”

  “So, what made you decide to show up now?”

  “I have a 411 for Sharon.”

  “What! You know about her?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I thought you told me you don’t do messages,” I said.

  “Yo. Check it out. I have a message.”

  “OK, let’s hear it.”

  “Sharon needs to watch her back, watch for sharks.”

  “Could you be a little more specific?”

  “No – that’s it. I gave you the word. Now it’s all you. She needs some serious help.”

  And with that, Tyler vanished. I dashed to my apparition chamber, hoping to catch him so I could drill him for more information about Sharon. But the chamber was empty. It felt more like a slightly shabby dressing room than any mystical place. I couldn’t get a sense of any energy having been there recently.

  This whole thing with Elisa’s friend Sharon was beginning to look a lot more interesting than I had expected. My curiosity was seriously piqued. I found myself looking forward to Elisa’s party with a mixture of excitement and apprehension.

  Chapter 3

  Elisa and Jack Bonner’s house is perched on the side of a mountain in Pine Brook Hills, a fifteen-minute drive from Boulder, with views of the foothills and the Boulder city lights that add thousands to its value. They built the house in 1991 when Jack started making big money in commercial real estate, and like everything involving Elisa, it was done on a grand scale. Vaulted ceilings, soaring windows, hardwood floors, custom lighting, natural stone fireplace—the works. No question they spend money where it shows. I’m not always comfortable with that. Sometimes it strikes me as an overstated in-your-face kind of materialism. But I have to admit I love their extravagant parties, where the food and the wine is
decadently delicious.

  I let myself in to the living room where at least thirty people were drinking wine and snacking on Elisa’s famous hors d’oeuvres. Guitar music and raucous conversation floated toward me from the deck in back of the house. As I stood near the door checking out the crowd, I saw a tall woman with shaggy reddish-brown hair cross the flagstone patio to the front door. She wore a green silk shirt, white crop pants and sandals, and looked to be in her mid-thirties—just about my age. She hesitated, grimaced briefly, shrugged her shoulders and reached toward the doorbell. She looked vaguely familiar, and I was about to open the door and invite her in when she rang the bell. Elisa ran up, swung the screen door open and mashed her in an enormous hug.

  “Sharon, honey! At last! We were afraid you’d changed your mind again.” Elisa had on one of her more exotic outfits—a turquoise and silver dress with an intricate filigreed silver belt—that guaranteed she would stand out in the crowd.

  “I’ve been watching for you, you know. I intend to personally make sure you enjoy yourself tonight.”

  “I told you I’m not sure I’m really up for a party,” Sharon said, “but here I am.”

  “You’ll be so glad you came once you meet Cleo,” Elisa said, ferrying Sharon toward me. “Cleo, this is Sharon, at last! Sharon, Cleo. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted while I run to the kitchen to check on the servers.” Elisa darted off through the crowd, grabbing empty glasses and discarded napkins from tables as she passed by.

  By then I had figured out how I knew Sharon. “You’re Sharon from Shady Terrace,” I said.

  She had recognized me as well. “Right. I’m a social worker there,” she said, giving me a small smile. “And your grandmother is Martha Donnelly. I don’t usually work on the Alzheimer’s unit, but we’ve met at Family Council meetings. I just never connected you to Elisa. I really don’t know anything about your work, but Elisa’s been nagging me about meeting you. You know how insistent she can be.”