Chapter Thirteen #2
‘Right.’ Lissa shifts her weight in the armchair.
‘Well I think I might have had a past life.’ Saying it out loud sounds totally insane – and yet not at all.
Because giving voice to the idea seems to settle something in her.
‘Or, well, multiple past lives. Is it possible to have multiple past lives?’ And yes, she is going there.
She is having this conversation with a so-called holistic psychic therapist. She’s just thankful that no one is around to see her doing it.
‘Of course,’ Saskia says, matter-of-fact.
‘Most people do. I, for one, feel confident that I have lived a life in Egypt, though I’m sincerely hoping I wasn’t mummified, and I’m sure that at one point I knew how to start a fire with nothing more than wood and stone – something my partner is adamant can’t be true, based on my barbecuing skills. ’
This gets a surprised snort of laughter from Lissa, and Saskia smiles in response. She seems nice. So maybe, if she’s a con artist, she doesn’t know she is.
Lissa leans forward, placing her hands on her thighs. ‘The thing is, I’ve been having these flashbacks. That’s what they are, I’m sure of it – like memories. From another lifetime. Three lifetimes, to be exact.’
‘Three,’ Saskia repeats. Is it just Lissa, or does she sound a little careful? Despite what she said, maybe she thinks Lissa’s mad. To be fair, maybe she is.
‘You said most people have multiple past lives?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Well I have three.’ Possibly more, but her current working theory is that Scotland in the 1800s is the first one, based on the fact that she’s only had one memory of that, and it was blurred.
‘Okay …’ Saskia’s gaze is very direct on Lissa’s. ‘Well if you’re sure about that, what do you need help with?’
Lissa feels a spike of something – excitement maybe, at finally getting to the point, at being able to talk it through with someone. ‘I want to know why.’
‘Why? You mean why souls are reincarnated?’ Saskia purses her lips, painted a pale pink. ‘I’m not sure I can answer that for you – there are plenty of different theories, many centred on the fact that energy doesn’t just disappear when someone dies, but—’
‘No,’ Lissa interrupts. ‘Not why they are reincarnated, why I am.’
She gets another raised-eyebrow look at that – because she’s being egotistical?
‘Or,’ she continues, trying to make up for it, ‘not, like, why I’m reincarnated in the grand scheme of things, but more why I’m having these … visions.’
Saskia cocks her head. Her diamond stud earrings glint in the sliver of sunlight through the window at her back. ‘Well, maybe you’re a little clairvoyant yourself?’
Lissa frowns. ‘But I’ve never experienced anything like this before. So why now all of a sudden?’
Saskia hesitates for a beat, uncrossing and recrossing her ankles. Lissa wonders if she doesn’t believe her. Then she wonders if it matters all that much if she believes her if she can still give her some answers. After all, she’s paying for the whole session, isn’t she?
‘How long have you been experiencing the memories?’ Saskia asks, apparently coming to some internal decision.
‘I don’t know. A few months, maybe?’
‘Can you think of when they started, specifically? Did something happen, perhaps, to trigger the first one?’
Lissa leans back in the armchair, tapping her fingers against her thigh.
She remembers waking up disoriented after the first one.
Waking up in a bed that wasn’t her own. And if she was in Mark’s bed, that means it was the day after the anniversary of Chloe’s death – the day after her reckless, stupid decision.
So does that mean it really is all about her sister?
Saskia smiles, the skin around her eyes creasing. ‘You’re figuring something out, I can see.’
Lissa shakes her head. ‘I’m not so sure about that.’ Because why would it happen now, twenty years after the fact? Is she trying too hard to understand something that arguably doesn’t make sense at all?
‘In each of them, I lose a sister,’ she says slowly, thinking as she speaks.
She’s not totally sure of that statement – she knows it happened in the 1940s, but she had a hint of it in the 1920s, too, walking along the corridor of her house, trailing her fingers over the brass doorknob, behind which lay an untouched room – her sister’s bedroom.
So it would follow, wouldn’t it, given when the flashbacks started, that that’s what connects them all?
She blinks over at Saskia, who is watching her, waiting. ‘Why would that happen again and again?’
‘Well,’ Saskia begins, her tone even, ‘there are some theories that people create similar responses in others whenever they meet over the course of a lifetime. That because we react to our parents, our friends, love interests in similar ways, we make a sort of pattern. Until our souls are able to learn and grow, that is.’
Lissa’s heart rate spikes uncomfortably. ‘So you’re saying it’s my fault – in every life?’
‘No,’ Saskia says quickly, ‘no, that’s not what I mean at all.
I just mean that often there are similarities between lifetimes, not in what we might have been doing or where we were living or even the gender we were, but on some basic core level.
’ She takes a breath, her chest rising and falling with the motion.
‘But the other thing that could be happening, Lissa, is that your sister’s death in the past lives that you think you’re seeing could be a metaphor for something else entirely – or it could be you simply processing the trauma of her death in this lifetime. ’
Lissa doesn’t think she’s told Saskia about Chloe – but then it’s not exactly a leap, is it?
‘Yeah,’ she mumbles, ‘I did wonder that.’ But she keeps coming back to the fact that if that’s what it is, why wouldn’t she only see her sister’s death – why would she be experiencing glamorous parties, for instance?
‘Is it …’ She hesitates, knowing how this will sound. ‘Could it be punishment?’
‘Punishment?’ Right, yes, she sounds insane, based on Saskia’s reaction.
But Chloe died because she left her by the pond. And her sister in the 1940s died because of her too. She doesn’t know yet if it’s the same for all of them, but if it is …
Saskia is frowning at her now. She has a very expressive face, Lissa is finding. ‘Do you think you deserve punishment, Lissa?’
‘No,’ she says automatically, even as her brain thinks: Yes. ‘I’m just curious.’
‘Hmm. Well, either way, I don’t think that can be it. I’m not qualified to explain life’s mysteries – far from it – but I can say that I don’t think the universe sets out to punish or reward people, however much some might wish that were the case.’
Lissa is quiet for a moment. She hopes Saskia is right about that. She hopes it’s not about experiencing the grief of many lifetimes in order to pay for what she did.
‘Perhaps it’s more about you learning something,’ Saskia says, after a beat of quiet.
Lissa’s eyes refocus on the woman in front of her. ‘But what?’
Saskia smiles a little, shakes her head. ‘I can’t tell you that. You’re the one experiencing this.’
Lissa frowns – that’s not overly helpful, is it?
As if she can hear Lissa’s thoughts, Saskia chuckles quietly.
‘Often with these things it’s not about the specifics, but about something much more general.
And I have found that sometimes it seems as if a present life is giving us a chance to right the wrongs of the past. I’m not saying that’s always the case – though it would be nice if it was – but I had a client once who had a traumatic past life, from what she could remember after her regression.
A house being burnt down, children torn from her, forced to flee her home.
In the present, she’s a happily married mother of three who has been in the same home for twenty years.
So it was like she’d had the chance to have the life she wanted – or at least she wanted those things because of what had happened to her. ’
Lissa stares at Saskia, trying to keep up.
Then, ‘I don’t know how that applies to me,’ she says bluntly.
After all, Chloe has already died. And it’s far too late to rectify that, isn’t it?
Unless it’s about her learning something now to take into a future life.
So that next time, she doesn’t leave her sister alone – so that she can prevent her death.
Which leads her to realise … ‘I don’t know how I died.
’ She finishes the thought out loud. ‘In any of the lives, I mean. I’m only getting flashes of particular moments – and I don’t know how I died.
’ Her sister, and romance, that’s all she’s seeing.
And she doesn’t know what the romance is teaching her, unless it’s trying to encourage her to find the love of her life in this lifetime too.
But she doesn’t seem to be much older than she is now, in any of the flashbacks.
And if she lived in both the 1920s and the 1950s, she must have died young in at least one of her lives.
Saskia offers another of her sympathetic smiles. ‘I know better than anyone that we can’t control what we see or don’t see, and that things are often confusing, out of order. Our minds are trying to make sense of a bigger picture, but we’re unequipped to do so.’
Lissa huffs out an impatient breath. ‘I just … I feel like there’s something I’m supposed to be understanding from all this, but it’s like my mind just won’t catch up.’
Saskia contemplates her for a moment. ‘It may be you’re thinking too hard about it.
There’s not necessarily a reason behind everything – and even if there is, sometimes by staring directly at something it becomes harder to see what that reason is.
’ She lets that sink in, then adds, ‘For what it’s worth, when I do regression sessions, I often tell my clients that the experience is less about trying to pinpoint what exactly happened in the past – because we rarely get concrete answers about that – and more about what we might be able to uncover about ourselves in the present, to help with our future. ’
Lissa wrinkles her nose at that – it’s not the answer she came here for.
Saskia smiles a little, like she can see her thoughts.
‘I do also think there’s a danger that by focusing obsessively on the past, we let our present lives pass us by.
That’s the same with any past – I’m not just talking about past lives here. ’
But how is she supposed to not focus on her past, when it seems intent on haunting her?
‘I wonder, Lissa,’ Saskia continues, ‘would you consent to letting me read your cards for you?’
Lissa frowns. She seems to have done a lot of that this session. ‘Cards?’
‘Tarot. It might help us figure out what you need to reframe in order to move past this and learn whatever it is you feel you need to learn.’
‘Tarot cards?’ She can’t quite keep the scepticism out of her voice.
Saskia laughs, a big, booming sound. Lissa finds she likes it.
‘So you’re willing to believe in past lives, but you don’t believe in tarot?
’ Lissa wrinkles her nose, unable to answer that one.
‘Well,’ Saskia says, ‘there’s no pressure.
But if you decide you want to give it a go, let me know.
It would be free of charge, given that I don’t think today really counts as a session. ’
‘Oh. Well, thank you.’ It’s a kind gesture, one that leads Lissa to think she was right in her assessment of Saskia the first time around – if she’s faking her clairvoyant skills, she’s not doing it intentionally. ‘I’ll think about it.’
‘Do,’ Saskia says, as they both get to their feet. ‘Because I’d say it sounds like you’re a little stuck in the past, and maybe you ought to start thinking a bit about your future.’