Dancing in the Light by Shirley Maclaine Page B

hadn’t been a robbery after all. Yet I couldn’t imagine what it really was.”
    “So, then?” Mother said.
    “Two days after Thanksgiving, Kevin Ryerson was in town. I called him for a channeling session, thinking I could ask McPherson what had happened. I didn’t tell Kevin anything about it. He went into trance and McPherson came through. The first sentence out of his mouth was ‘Did you detect the fine hand of my pickpocket capacity the other day?’
    “Then it hit me. Of course, it was McPherson.”
    “McPherson?” said Mother. “Oh my! However did he do it?”
    “Well, I asked him just that, and he said he’d miscalculated: he hadn’t meant to dematerialize the bag completely—just to move it behind the salesgirl’s counter.”
    “He could have made a lot of trouble for her,”Mother said. I laughed because that really hadn’t occurred to me.
    “Well, anyway,” I said, “I had quite a fight with him about it. In fact, I yelled, ‘What the hell do you mean, you miscalculated? ’
    “ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I hadn’t realized how much you had actually progressed in your own mediumistic light frequencies. My light frequency mingled with yours and the combination of the two caused the bag to dematerialize rather than simply to move.’ ”
    Mother leaned forward as though she couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
    “I couldn’t believe it either,” I told her. “I asked him if he was telling me my purse with all its contents was hanging around somewhere up there on the spiritual plane.”
    Mother looked confused. I saw I’d better get this over with.
    “Well, he said that would be against cosmic law. But since he was responsible for the mistake of dematerialization, it was up to him to find someone who could karmically profit from it. He said I’d get it all back except for the tapes.”
    “The tapes?” said Mother.
    “Yes,” I said, “it seems Tom gave the tapes to someone who needed them more than I did.”
    “Well, what happened with all the other stuff?” Mother said.
    “Oh, it all came back, just as Tom had said it would. Including my prescription eyeglasses, which I had been missing.”
    “How?”
    “In a manila envelope, left at the door. No name or return address or anything. The point of the whole thing though, really, was that I had become too dependent on the tapes—they wanted to show me I didn’t need them anymore.”
    “Oh, my goodness, Shirl,” said Mother. “And this really happened?”
    “It certainly did, every bit of it.”
    “Well, what do you make of it?” she asked, longing for a “logical” explanation.
    “I really don’t know,” I answered, “but until something better explains it, I just have to believe what McPherson said.”
    “Oh, my,” said Mother, “I don’t know whether I’d be frightened or not.”
    “Well,” I said, “I figure, unless something hurts me, there’s no reason to be scared. You’re not frightened of your ‘friends,’ are you?”
    “Oh, no,” she said, “on the contrary. They make me very happy and I love to laugh with them. They’re really nice and I feel they are my friends.”
    “Well, then.”
    “Yes,” she said, laughing. “But I don’t know how many friends I’d have left in the neighborhood if I told them about my ‘other friends.’ ”
    “Yes,” I said, “I know the feeling. But I think you’d be surprised how many other people have ‘friends’ they don’t talk about.”
    Mother nodded, sucked in another breath, and rolled her eyes.
    Just then Daddy walked back into the room. Mother put her fingers to her lips and said, “Sh-h-h,” as if this were our secret.
    “Well, Monkey,” said Daddy, “a cab’s waiting. I think you’d better go.”
    I picked up all my stuff, kissed them both goodbye, winked at Mother, and told Daddy to stay with her. I said I’d call them when I got back to New York, so they wouldn’t worry that I had missed my show.
    I left the hospital room and