Read Online The Haunting of the Gemini by Jackie Barrett - Free Book Online Page A

like a Neanderthal!”
    My client got up to use the restroom, and I immediately followed him. This was my chance to shake some sense into him. I trailed him right into the men’s room and waited for him to come out of the stall.
    I told him to get it together and then straightened his shirt. But the doll wouldn’t fit back into his pocket because his irritable bowel syndrome had made him bloated and his pants were too tight. I told him to just stick it down his pants and go back to the table. His date was waiting for him.
    I left first and sat down with Gino. So I had a great view when my client came out of the restroom with his zipper down and the voodoo doll halfway out of his pants. Heck, the whole restaurant had a great view. People’s jaws dropped. Our waitress tried not to laugh.
    But his date didn’t see anything funny about it. My client tried to explain why he had a doll with her picture on it protruding from his crotch, but really, what can you say at that point? As the maître d’ escorted him out, I shook my head in confusion. My vision of him in this restaurant had been so clear. I didn’t understand it.
    But then the waitress walked out with him, consoling him. She obviously thought he was adorable. That gave me something to think about. And later I found out that in all the doll-in-the-pants chaos, Gino had taken the opportunity to slip the pretty office colleague his phone number. Some may call him a weasel, but I call him slick. The last I heard, they were dating and having a fantastic time.
    And my client? He and the waitress got engaged a year after that night. That restaurant
had
been calling me. All of us were supposed to be there at that particular time, all for love.

SIX

    Finding out who was invading my body and soul was one thing. Figuring out how to keep ahold of myself was completely different. And this was where I was in uncharted territory.
    Ever since I was a child, the dead have come to me. They have showed me their last hours, or the years of abuse, or the people responsible for their deaths. They have told me, in their individual ways, that they are not ready to go. One prankster named Tod would hang around just to make me laugh. He’d worked as a clown before he died of a heart attack in his fifties. He would stop by, eat from the fridge, tell me knock-knock jokes. Finally, I took him with me on one of my trips to New Orleans. I thought Bourbon Street would be a great place for him. I was right. He stayed, and now I see him when I go back to visit the city, mingling in his clown costume alongside the palm readers and dancers in Jackson Square.
    Another of my visitors stayed with me for eight years. He appeared a few days after 9/11 and just took up residence. He would shave and get ready for the day and then go down to my office and get to work. I knew it was a residual haunting and that he wasn’t ready to face his own death in the Twin Towers. He just kept working, every day like the last. Until one day, a woman—whole and alive—came to see me. She had finally broken from the grief of losing her husband in the terrorist attacks and was close to killing herself. She came to me to find reasons not to. And I, without realizing it at first, had one for her. My friend, who watched many of my work sessions, stared at her in shock. For the first time, he asked me if he had died in the first tower. He knelt before his wife and told her that she was not ready to join him. She did not hear him with her ears, but she did hear him with her heart. He had been working all that time, even in death, to give his family a better life.
    But these hauntings and others always left room for me when they visited. They always respected me as a person and gave me my own space. Until Patricia. She really was trying to take over. And it was now to the point where it was really pissing me off. I’ve always been empathetic toward the dead—obviously—and before