another of the same pale-blue bottles.
“We had the glass tested. The bottles date back to the mid-sixteenth century. We believe they were part of René le Florentin’s collection.”
Jac removed the fourth silver bell. Beneath it was . . . nothing.
“What happened?”
“There are two missing. One was lost before I bought the collection. Your brother broke that one by accident.” Melinoe shook her head; the incident was obviously still bothering her.
“I’m sure Robbie was careful.” Jac wasn’t certain why she was defending her brother.
“Yes, I know he was,” Melinoe said.
Jac continued to inspect the inscriptions. Robbie had clearly been fascinated with the idea of what these bottles contained and the concept they represented. And he had done his best to bequeath his interest in it to her.
“What is it? You were shaking your head,” Melinoe asked.
“Nothing really.” She put the bell down. “Other than these measuring tools, ingredients and books—is there anything else of Robbie’s?”
Melinoe pushed the door back a little. A navy sweater was hanging there. Thick cashmere, hooded. Jac recognized it and took it off the hook. Robbie had so many sweaters just like this. Once he found a style he liked, he stockpiled it. There had been a hunter green one on the back of his chair in the workshop at home. As she held the sweater, Robbie’s smell rose up and surrounded her. Jac knew that the olfactory center in the brain was next to the memory center. There was a scientific reason for scent and memory to be connected. But for her it was more exaggerated. And now, suddenly, in front of these strangers, not quite in the room, not quite in her mind, she heard her brother’s voice.
I haven’t left you. I won’t leave you.
For years, Jac’s mother had talked to her from the grave whenever she visited her at the family mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in upstate New York.
Hearing her mother’s voice was just one of the reasons Jac was never quite sure she was completely sane. The hallucinations she’d had since she was a child were another. When they multiplied after her mother’s death, Jac’s father had taken her to a myriad of doctors. One finally determined the manifestation was caused by a bad synapse in her brain. She’d seen the MRI on her father’s desk with the doctor’s notes attached. Read the words and studied the picture. Jac was fourteen. Old enough to understand that in her brain, in the area where the disease was usually found, she had a cluster of malformed cells. What the doctor wrote proved she didn’t suffer from an overactive imagination but from an illness. There was no cure, but there were psychopharmacological drugs that could prevent the hallucinations. But there were side effects. Jac felt as if she were living behind a wall. Soon, the world dulled. She became lethargic.
That’s when her grandmother insisted Jac be sent to the Blixer Rath clinic in Switzerland. A Jungian institution where Malachai Samuels was one of the therapists. This “last resort,” as her father had called it, was run by disciples of Carl Jung, who believed many so-called “brain diseases” could be cured with the healing of the soul. Like his mentor, Charles Blixer said the psyche required mythic and spiritual exploration before medications.
The traditional medical community was openly hostile to this holistic, soul-centered approach. But it helped Jac. During her nine months in the clinic she was exposed to in-depth analytic therapy designed to strengthen her own healing abilities. In order to understand the symbolism of her dreams and drawings done after deep meditative sessions, in order to translate her symptoms and recognize any possible synchronistic events in her life that might have a deeper meaning, Jac had to learn the universal language of the soul. What Jung called mythology. And the man who taught her that language and spoke it with her was Dr. Malachai Samuels.
On leave
“We had the glass tested. The bottles date back to the mid-sixteenth century. We believe they were part of René le Florentin’s collection.”
Jac removed the fourth silver bell. Beneath it was . . . nothing.
“What happened?”
“There are two missing. One was lost before I bought the collection. Your brother broke that one by accident.” Melinoe shook her head; the incident was obviously still bothering her.
“I’m sure Robbie was careful.” Jac wasn’t certain why she was defending her brother.
“Yes, I know he was,” Melinoe said.
Jac continued to inspect the inscriptions. Robbie had clearly been fascinated with the idea of what these bottles contained and the concept they represented. And he had done his best to bequeath his interest in it to her.
“What is it? You were shaking your head,” Melinoe asked.
“Nothing really.” She put the bell down. “Other than these measuring tools, ingredients and books—is there anything else of Robbie’s?”
Melinoe pushed the door back a little. A navy sweater was hanging there. Thick cashmere, hooded. Jac recognized it and took it off the hook. Robbie had so many sweaters just like this. Once he found a style he liked, he stockpiled it. There had been a hunter green one on the back of his chair in the workshop at home. As she held the sweater, Robbie’s smell rose up and surrounded her. Jac knew that the olfactory center in the brain was next to the memory center. There was a scientific reason for scent and memory to be connected. But for her it was more exaggerated. And now, suddenly, in front of these strangers, not quite in the room, not quite in her mind, she heard her brother’s voice.
I haven’t left you. I won’t leave you.
For years, Jac’s mother had talked to her from the grave whenever she visited her at the family mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in upstate New York.
Hearing her mother’s voice was just one of the reasons Jac was never quite sure she was completely sane. The hallucinations she’d had since she was a child were another. When they multiplied after her mother’s death, Jac’s father had taken her to a myriad of doctors. One finally determined the manifestation was caused by a bad synapse in her brain. She’d seen the MRI on her father’s desk with the doctor’s notes attached. Read the words and studied the picture. Jac was fourteen. Old enough to understand that in her brain, in the area where the disease was usually found, she had a cluster of malformed cells. What the doctor wrote proved she didn’t suffer from an overactive imagination but from an illness. There was no cure, but there were psychopharmacological drugs that could prevent the hallucinations. But there were side effects. Jac felt as if she were living behind a wall. Soon, the world dulled. She became lethargic.
That’s when her grandmother insisted Jac be sent to the Blixer Rath clinic in Switzerland. A Jungian institution where Malachai Samuels was one of the therapists. This “last resort,” as her father had called it, was run by disciples of Carl Jung, who believed many so-called “brain diseases” could be cured with the healing of the soul. Like his mentor, Charles Blixer said the psyche required mythic and spiritual exploration before medications.
The traditional medical community was openly hostile to this holistic, soul-centered approach. But it helped Jac. During her nine months in the clinic she was exposed to in-depth analytic therapy designed to strengthen her own healing abilities. In order to understand the symbolism of her dreams and drawings done after deep meditative sessions, in order to translate her symptoms and recognize any possible synchronistic events in her life that might have a deeper meaning, Jac had to learn the universal language of the soul. What Jung called mythology. And the man who taught her that language and spoke it with her was Dr. Malachai Samuels.
On leave
Similar Books
