Page 39 of Chasing Dreams
For a second Shaine thought she might faint. For another second she thought she had. But then she realized the sense of vertigo wasn’t physical.
“It’s there, Shaine,” Austin said softly near her face. “The picture is there. You feel it. You sense it. Let yourself move toward it. Remember everything we’ve talked about. Remember the exercises. Use your reference points. Nobody is going to care that you can see it. I want you to see it. You want to see it. Don’t fight it. Let go.”
Colors exploded inside her head. Soft colors. Gentle colors. Aqua. Fluffy yellow. Pink.
And in the midst of that half-defined palette of pastels, she saw what he wanted her to see.
Chapter 8
Oh, but she was a beautiful girl. Her gilt-framed photograph sat on a glossy piano in a sunny plant-filled room. In the picture she wore a pink leotard and white tights. The laces of her satin slippers twined up her calves. A ribbon-festooned garland of white net wreathed her head, and hidden beneath the headpiece, her hair was dark and smooth, fashioned into two braids.
A man sat at the piano, his hands moving over the keys, music resonating from the instrument and filling the room. Mozart, but Shaine couldn’t identify the piece by name.
“There’s more,” she whispered, instinctively understanding another realm of this vision waited just out of reach. Frustration and panic warred for prominence, and she clenched her hands into fists.
“Relax,” he said, his voice soothing her apprehension. “Turn with it, Shaine. Let it take you along. Don’t adhere to the boundaries of your natural mind. Go outside them. You’re making all the rules. There’s no wrong or right.”
In her mind she searched until the image came into focus. “It’s a headstone. There are...pink azaleas planted at the foot.”
“Someone’s seeing this, Shaine. Who is it? Whose eyes are you seeing through?”
Deep despair welled up inside her—anguish and suffering and...anger. Anger over her loss. Anger that the life of her child had been snuffed out. Anguish sat like an anvil on her chest. “Her mother,” she whispered, finding it difficult to breathe.
“Don’t stop there. What else do you see? What does the marker say?”
Shaine reached out and touched the cold granite stone, her fingers outlining the rough texture of the words and the drawing above. “Ballet slippers, with the laces dangling down.”
“Where are they?”
“They’re carved in the stone. And numbers.”
“Read them.”
“July seventh, twenty ten to April sixth, twenty twenty-one.”
“What else?”
“A dog. A small long-haired white dog with a rhinestone collar.”
“Where’s the dog?”
“I don’t know. In the car. Waiting in the car.”
“Where’s the car?”
“Up on the road. It’s long and silver.”
“What kind?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know cars. A Cadillac maybe.”
“Can you see the license plates?”
“Seven dash C three one twenty-nine.”
“What state?”
“I can’t read it from here.”
