Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble

Chapter 18

The wide streets of the North Side of Chicago looked practically abandoned behind snow banks as we drove south on Clark Street in search of West Fletcher Avenue, the street on which Bachitar Preet's yoga ashram was located. The warmer temperatures of the previous day had been replaced with yet another drop on the thermometer and a bitter wind chill factor so cold that my eyes had watered nonstop while I had waited for Henry to pick me up on the corner of Martha Road earlier that morning. It had even snowed just a little overnight before it had gotten too cold for flakes to fall, and every pedestrian we saw out on the sidewalk seemed like they were in an urgent hurry to get back inside. A tall man in a heavy coat stood at the top of the cement stairs leading to his front door, trying to coax a Golden Retriever into venturing further out into the snow for a walk. A woman twisted her head and pulled up the collar of her winter coat on the corner of Belmont Street, stopping in her tracks to brace herself against the bone-chilling wind just a few feet away from the entrance of a Dunkin' Donuts.

I was overly alert—jumpy, even—the whole time that Henry, Mischa, and I were in the cab of Henry's pick-up truck. When Mischa had called me the night before to tell me that she was going to decline the drive to Chicago out of a perfectly logical reluctance to place herself in the same vehicle as me and Henry, I had agreed that it was a good idea that the three of us not travel together, considering what had just happened to my mom the day before. But then she had called me back twice to provide me with questions that she made me promise not to forget to ask the yogi during our visit, and at the end of the second call she talked herself into just coming with us. While I definitely thought it increased the danger to us by about a million times if we were to travel as a group, I thought about how my heart had beaten just a tiny bit faster when Henry had been at my house earlier in the day and had looked into my eyes, and agreed that it was a good idea for Mischa to accompany us. Even the smallest, private admission to myself that Henry was handsome felt like a betrayal to Trey, and I didn't like to think of what might possibly happen if Henry and I were to spend the better part of a day alone.

Not that I wanted anything at all to happen. But the fact that it had even occurred to me that something might happen made me feel guilty enough to want Mischa to join us. Remembering back to the day in November outside the high school gym when I had been blindsided by a sudden irresistible physical attraction to Trey, I realized that if Violet's spirits wanted to trick me into doing something I would regret terribly, it wouldn't take much effort on their part.

"Good old Evanston," Henry muttered as we passed the exit to the university he had been attending earlier in the fall until Olivia died. Mischa and I both remained quiet. It was pointless to speculate how different Henry's life would have been by then if Olivia hadn't died. He'd have been in a frat, probably going to parties all the time. He would have surely found a girlfriend by then, and most likely would have made excuses to leave Weeping Willow early and return to campus in time to spend New Year's Eve with her.  He'd be training for tennis meets in the spring, probably with a legitimate shot at being named one of the best college players in the country. None of that mattered any more, though—none of what any of us were supposed to be doing with our lives mattered.

We exited the Kennedy Expressway according to the directions provided by Henry's GPS system, and drove over a bridge crossing the Chicago River, then past a bunch of auto car dealerships toward the hipster neighborhood where the ashram was located. I suspected we were getting close when there was a noticeable increase in the number of bars and coffee shops we passed in the pick-up truck.

"There it is! Fletcher Avenue," Mischa said, pointing to a street on our right, just before a huge sporting goods store on a corner.

The streets in this area of Chicago had been plowed after the big Christmas week snow storm, but in such a way that huge mountains of dirty snow, stained with street filth and dog urine, trapped cars against the curb where presumably they had been parked right before the snow had started falling.