Before
The flight from Santa Barbara Municipal Airport into Phoenix, Arizona was smooth, and the drive to the chapel in Mesa was just under thirty minutes, plenty of time for Rae Melissa Hunter to consider why they had come all this way to remember a woman who was more stranger than family.
They had only ever gone to visit her grandmother once, and now she was dead.
It's a bit late to start caring, isn't it? Rae had thought to herself.
Rae remembered sitting in a small room at the convalescent home, a strange hybrid of apartment and hospital decor, watching as her mother and father spoke to one another in hushed tones.
Her grandmother sat away from them all in her wheelchair, staring out the sliding glass door at the purple Jacaranda trees.
Now, Rae felt a pang of guilt for not trying harder to get to know her grandmother Louise.
–
Louise May Archibald died in the summer right before Rae's freshman year in high school.
Living in a picturesque retirement community, surrounded by a lush, green golf course at Serenity Villas in Mesa, Arizona, Louise had suddenly been unable to breathe, was rushed to urgent care, and a week later was pronounced dead at the young age of just 70-years-old.
"We're here to support your mother," Rae's father, Jim, had told her as they arrived at the funeral.
The chapel in Mesa was a white-washed, small building. It was surrounded by rose gardens, hidden grottos full of cacti, and a gravel parking lot. It was mid-July, and as they got out of the rental car, Rae could see heat waves shimmering across the empty, desert roads.
They were staying in a hotel just two blocks away from the chapel instead of their vacation home in Tucson.
"We won't be staying long," Rae's mother told the family before the service began. She said this with a feigned air of disappointment, since the shortness of the trip had been her decision.
–
The service began with Lana and her brother, Rae's uncle Dan, who took their places at the podium to say a few words.
"Louise died in her sleep without pain," Lana spoke so that her voice carried to the back of the full chapel. "She will be remembered as a strong, faithful and loving woman."
Despite her tender words, Lana did not tear up once, and Rae wondered if her mother really meant what she said. Had her mother actually loved Louise?
As the service went on, Rae became increasingly anxious.
A dead body wasn't something she was exactly excited to see. Rae had never been to an open casket funeral before. So, when it was time to approach the coffin, she hesitated. Would it be bad funeral etiquette to remain seated?
"It's okay," her father encouraged her, "Just look at grandma and say a prayer."
Slipping out of the pew, Rae joined the procession toward the front of the chapel. She watched what the people ahead of her did–genuflecting, signing the cross over their chests, reaching into the coffin and saying a short prayer–and she decided that she would sign herself with the cross.
![The End [Completed] oleh Zarnylove](https://img.wattpad.com/cover/167571426-80-k901264.jpg)
Keep it simple and get back to your seat, Rae told herself.
But when it was her turn, and she looked down at the woman who had raised her mother, something came over Rae, a feeling of intense longing that she didn't understand.
Her toes and the tips of her fingers felt numb and more than anything, she wanted to reach out and take Louise's hand.
So, she did.
The numbness in her hands and feet spread throughout her entire body like an electric shock, sharp and instantaneous. Her body split apart from itself, leaving half at the chapel while her other half floated up into the air, flying higher and higher until she was outside the chapel, and then, she was nowhere.
As if gravity had reversed itself, Rae found herself caught in the corner of a room in a house she didn't recognize, pressed against the ceiling like a balloon with no paper weight.
She saw Louise, but not in the way she had known her. She was young, slender, agile, a child and then a teenager, a mother and a wife, crying and laughing and throwing dishes at the wall and then sweeping up the pieces.
The vision was a sequence of scenes of a life now at its end; everything flashing before Rae's eyes in a montage that moved faster and faster the closer it got to the end, right to the moment Louise realized she couldn't breathe–
Rae was now floating in the corner of a hospital room, her grandmother looking more familiar, with the exception of clear tubes stuck in her nostrils.
Beige shadows, people without faces, were moving faster than the speed of light in and out of her grandmother's room, grabbing her hands and wishing her well. It was like watching a movie on fast-forward.
Then, the vision slowed down, and Rae could see what was happening, the shock writhing like a ball of tendrils inside of her chest.
Her grandmother was telling fortunes. Louise was a psychic.
Every person that came and went from the hospital room seemed to know Louise, or to have at least heard of her. They knelt at her bedside, she took their hands, and she read their lines and whispered in their ears.
Is this, real? Rae asked herself, not sure if she believed what she was seeing. She wasn't even sure if she believed how she was seeing it.
Rae could feel the vision slipping away from her as her body began to sag and feel heavy. But before everything collapsed around her Rae saw something else...someone else.
One last silhouette entered the room where her grandmother was dying. This time, it moved slowly, coming to hover at Louise's bedside. The shadow was not the color of light, but instead, was dark, like a man in a trench coat.
He was a loosely outlined mass of hazy dark-light, and although he didn't have a head per se, some part of him turned and Rae was sure he was looking right at her.
–
Rae jolted back from the coffin. Her body convulsing with an all-encompassing numbness, as if her skin had turned to static. She came crashing back into reality, tumbling backward and knocking into the people in line behind her.
