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  RACHAEL’S RETURN

  Copyright © 2020, Janet Rebhan.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2020

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-868-2

  ISBN: 978-1-63152-869-9

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020906107

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1569 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ALSO BY JANET REBHAN

  Finding Tranquility Base: A Novel

  For Mom & Dad

  “So is our present life only one of many thousands of such lives which we enter from the other, more real life. . .and then return after death.”

  —Leo Tolstoy

  “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting; the soul that rises with us, our life’s star, hath had elsewhere its setting, and cometh from afar. Not in entire forgetfulness and not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do we come.”

  —William Wordsworth

  “A little while, a moment of rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.”

  —Kahlil Gibran

  PROLOGUE

  Caroline Martin stared up at the ceiling tiles, small and square with tiny black holes that evoked an image of pepper jack cheese. Some were stained from leaky pipes that created ghostly formations of gray outlined in black above her head. The room was cold, and she began to shiver. One of the OR nurses noticed and covered her with another preheated hospital blanket, tucking it in under her chin and over her shoulders.

  “Thank you,” Caroline said through clenched teeth. She couldn’t move because they had already strapped her down to the operating table at her arms and just below her breasts. They left her legs free, covered with socks and leg warmers, as they would soon be placing her calves in stirrups. At least they had the decency to wait until she was completely under first. But after that, she was certain there would be no concern for her modesty.

  The pill they had given her fifteen minutes earlier began to take effect. Background noises blended together in a smothered cacophony, and only when someone got up close in her face was she able to focus. Even so, it was still a bit of an effort. She looked around the large square room: heads bobbed and swayed as the doctors and nurses went about their business, clanging metal instruments and talking among themselves about where they would spend their summer vacation or where they should take their spouses for an anniversary dinner. It was just another day for all of them, she knew, but somehow she still felt slightly insulted, taken for granted. As if he sensed her feelings, her gynecologist called to her from the end of the table as the nurses helped him on with his sterile gloves, his hands held high out to his sides.

  “What kind of music do you like, Caroline?” Dr. Goodwin asked in a cheery voice, as if he were about to invite her to dance. “Oldies okay with you? We all like oldies here.”

  “I love the oldies,” she replied. Her tongue felt like a fat, hairy caterpillar, and for a moment she became aware she was drifting, but she kind of liked it. She hoped they wouldn’t ask her any personal questions so she wouldn’t talk too much and say something she would later regret.

  Through hidden speakers, she heard the voices of the Temptations singing “Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone” on KRTH 101, the local Los Angeles oldies station. Some of the nurses sang along. The anesthesiologist approached for the second time and fiddled with her IV. He had introduced himself to her earlier, before they wheeled her into surgery, and had given her the little pill. “This will help you relax,” he had said. She guessed it was a Valium or perhaps a Demerol: just a tiny little thing, but potent. Now he smiled down at her, telling her to count backward slowly from twenty. She only got as far as eighteen.

  Book One

  CHAPTER 1

  If there was one thing Vito Gamboa couldn’t stand, it was an ungrateful woman. He tightened the fingers of his right hand and made a fist.

  The young woman glanced down at it and took a step back. “No, Vito, please . . .”

  “Mary Anne, you’ve pissed me off for the last time.” He took a step toward her. “If I have to teach you a lesson a million times till you get it—if that’s what it takes—then a million times it is. It’s your choice, woman.” The whites of his black-brown eyes were flecked with red, the pupils constricted as tight and small as the head of a pin.

  She looked at the tattoo on his right bicep—a serpent whose belly seemed to rise and fall as Vito flexed. She cried now, her tears leaving light trails down the front of her face where they cut through her foundation, which was one shade darker than her natural skin tone and orange in tint. The creases under her eyes were deep for someone her age, and they filled up now with melted black mascara.

  “I’m so tired of this, Vito. Can’t we please just stop?”

  Vito let out an involuntary hiss of air through his nostrils and curled the right side of his mouth upward in a crooked half smile. “It’s your choice, woman, like I said.”

  “Then I choose to end it—now!”

  “It’s too late this time. I owe you a lesson. Maybe you’ll think twice the next time, though, before it’s too late.”

  He proceeded to beat her about the face and chest with his clenched fists. When he finished, he straddled her wilted body with his legs and squatted down, hovering just above her heaving chest. She wore a white maternity top with lace around the collar and pearl buttons down the front. Her long blonde hair lay flat and matted against damp, flushed cheeks. The thought he may have gone too far this time crossed his mind, but he quickly dismissed it. He reached out and cupped her face in both hands. She moaned and opened swollen eyes.

  “Look at me,” he said.

  Her eyes rolled up and back, leaving her pupils hidden behind her lids.

  He shook her hard. “Look at me!” he shouted.

  “Please,” she whispered.

  He squeezed her face between his hands and then slowly loosened his grip, wiping her tears away with his thumbs.

  “Don’t you ever, ever try to leave me again,” he said.

  Ragna Sweeney looked out her kitchen window at the apartment building across the alleyway.

  “They’re going at it again,” she said.

  “Call the cops,” her husband, Harold, answered, not bothering to look up from his newspaper. He had settled for the evening in his favorite recliner in front of the television set.

  “Well, it’s over now; there’s no need to. Besides, I don’t like poking my nose in other people’s business.”

  Harold turned his face toward his wife. His forehead crinkled as he looked over his bifocals at her, and his throat released a muffled chortle. “Oh really?” he said. “Then sit down and watch Wheel of Fortune with me. It’s starting right after this commercial.”

  Ragna hesitated a moment, then let
the curtain panel fall back into place against the window. This time her neighbors had their blinds drawn, so they could only be heard and not seen. The last time, she had actually witnessed the guy socking the young woman about her head, and she had called the police. By the time they arrived, the man had already forcibly taken his very pregnant wife—or girlfriend, Ragna wasn’t sure which—thrown her into his dark-gray Dodge Challenger, and raced his engine in the direction of Winnetka Avenue. Afterward, when the police knocked on Ragna’s door, she gave them a description of the man. “He’s a handsome guy, looks Hispanic, in his late twenties or early thirties, about five feet, ten inches tall, one hundred sixty pounds, defined muscles. He’s got a pronounced tattoo of a snake coiling the entire length of his right arm. I heard he’s an actor or stuntman or something of the sort.” Then they asked about the woman.

  “She’s just a girl, really,” Ragna had told them. “Can’t be more than seventeen or eighteen. I doubt she’s even out of high school yet. Pretty thing, too—I mean, if she cleaned herself up. The really sad thing is she’s pregnant. Looks like somewhere in her third trimester.”

  “Honey, can you bring me a beer since you’re up, please?” Harold looked up at his wife and kissed the air in her direction.

  Ragna smiled back and turned toward the refrigerator, reaching into the back where she had placed the six-pack. She twisted the metal cap off the bottle of Bud Light and drained it into a tall glass tilted sideways to keep the froth from forming too thick at the top.

  “Wheel! Of! Fortune!” she heard the audience yell in unison from the television set. She turned to walk toward the living room, reaching to switch off the light as she headed out of the kitchen.

  And that’s when she heard it.

  She would later tell the police the precise time because it occurred at the beginning of her favorite show. “Seven thirty p.m.” she would say. “At first I thought it was a loud backfire—as if the car was in the alleyway directly beneath my kitchen window—it was so loud.”

  Ragna startled, dropping the glass of beer on the solid linoleum floor. She watched it shatter and disperse into a myriad of tiny wet shards around her feet. Then she heard the scream that followed, and she knew it wasn’t a backfire. It was a haunting scream—one that would cause her to have nightmares for many nights to come. She looked out the window and saw nothing. She reached for the telephone hanging from the wall in the kitchen and dialed 9-1-1 with trembling hands. Harold stood now, his newspaper having dropped to the floor beside him. His eyes bulged, brows raised.

  “Was that what I think it was?” He and his wife exchanged glances.

  “Oh my God, I think so,” she said. She shook her head from side to side and felt her face heat up. Tears began to fill her eyes as her body spontaneously reacted with emotion to the sounds, causing her to picture, against her will, what must have just happened in the apartment across the alley from her own. “He’s shot her,” she said. “That bastard just shot her.”

  Caroline Martin shut the lid of her overnight bag and looked around her bedroom. She knew she would only be gone for a couple of days, but still she had the nagging feeling she was forgetting something important. Something very important. I’ve got my toothbrush, clean underwear, eyeglasses, and novel—though she doubted she’d feel good enough to read—slippers, lipstick, powder, mascara—though she doubted she’d be concerned about her appearance—and a change of clothes to wear on the way home. She sat on the edge of the bed and thought for a moment. Nightgown! Of course. She stood and opened her bureau drawer, retrieving a long white gown, then rethought her choice: Bloodstains are hard to get out of white. She placed the nightgown back in the drawer and reached for the dark-blue plaid Victoria’s Secret pajama set her sons had recently given her as a Mother’s Day gift. She was glad she wouldn’t have to be stuck in a hospital gown slit up the back with her rear in full view as she staggered up and down the hallways, pushing her IV. That was what happened to her the last time. The nurses had forced her out of bed to walk only one day after her surgery. They said it would make her heal faster. She was young, they had said. She could handle it.

  Caroline didn’t feel so young these days. She knew she was probably going through some kind of midlife crisis. She had recently turned forty-five, and her youngest son, Paul—whom they affectionately called Pauley—had just graduated from high school. Sammy, her oldest, was already a junior at UCLA. She could throw in a bit of empty-nest syndrome as well.

  “Oh God, I’m so neurotic,” she said. “What is wrong with me?”

  She would never be able to have another child after this hysterectomy. And although she had no intention of having any more, it still bothered her. When she had gone to see her ob-gyn a week ago, she had even suspected she might be pregnant. She was only a week away from having her fibroid-plagued uterus removed when she noticed she was bloated more so than usual, and her breasts felt tender to the touch. She had missed her period, but it didn’t mean anything, as her periods were sporadic, anyway, because of her fibroids. Still, she was concerned, so she made an appointment and went in to have her urine tested. The pregnancy test came back negative. Dr. Goodwin had looked at her with an expression of pity on his face. Caroline had felt ashamed and embarrassed. How original she was: another woman unable to handle the loss of her youth, her fertility. The finality of it pained her in a way she could never have imagined.

  She reached up and cupped her still-tender breasts with both hands. She could have sworn she was pregnant. She was so sure the test was going to come back positive. When it didn’t, she thought she would feel relieved, but to her surprise, she had cried as soon as she got in her car and began the drive home from the doctor’s office. Part of her would have been delighted to have another baby. Even though her logical mind told her now was the time to move on to new challenges. One chapter of her life was closing, and another was beginning. Now she and Jake, her husband, could go on romantic getaways to the Caribbean without worrying about leaving Pauley home alone in the house. She could go back to school and get her teaching credentials, go back to work, or just relax and fill her days with her favorite hobbies: tennis, gardening, antique shopping, and gourmet cooking to name a few.

  She also had her volunteer work. While studying for her undergraduate degree, Caroline had taken a class in sign language on a whim. Her teacher told her she was a natural and recruited her to sign at events outside of school. Sometimes she even got paid for it. She had gone on to sign at events for politicians she met through her husband’s law firm. She also worked as a tutor with hearing-impaired children through a local charity.

  That was what most of her friends were doing now. They were in early retirement, after having given themselves fully to the raising of their children. And well deserved, Caroline thought. Motherhood, when truly committed to, was a career in itself. Even though society urged women to do it all, Caroline knew she was not one to pursue a career and raise children at the same time—unless, of course, she had no choice but to work outside the home. But she did have a choice. She and Jake had planned it that way from the beginning. They had agreed he would be the breadwinner and she would be a stay-at-home mom. She had graduated with her bachelor’s degree in education, but had only worked for six months as an administrative assistant before marrying. Within three months of her honeymoon, she’d found herself pregnant with Sammy.

  She had been fully there for her sons and had loved every minute of raising them. She reveled in home life and had become the quintessential domestic goddess: decorating the house, cooking meals for the family every night of the week, entertaining her husband’s clients on weekends. She loved it all. But the boys were always her number one priority. Soccer practice, band practice, field trips, school food drives—you name it, she had been present for it. She had no regrets. Well, maybe one: she had always wanted a girl. But after Pauley was born, they had gone through some financial strain when her husband left his firm to open his own practice. They put off havi
ng any more children for a few years, and then she’d developed the fibroid tumors. The doctor urged her to have them surgically removed before trying to get pregnant again. Two surgeries later, they had grown back yet again, causing anemia from the heavy bleeding, and now she had finally chosen to take the extreme route to free herself from the problem.

  Yet she hadn’t been prepared for the intensity of emotion she would go through in taking this route. She was even having weird dreams. In one dream, a baby girl nursing at her breasts and reaching her free hand up toward Caroline’s face had been so intense and realistic, it had caused Caroline to suddenly awaken and catch her breath. She even caught herself wondering if it was possible for a baby’s soul to send her messages through her dreams. But her intuitions had been proven wrong. The doctor said the pregnancy test was negative. Negative. She would just have to accept that her child-rearing days were behind her and move through the pain and into her future. What that might be, she wasn’t sure yet.

  Mary Anne Maynard lay on the floor of her apartment, barely able to breathe. Her head pounded, and her chest felt numb and sunken. She opened her eyes, and the ceiling spun around her.

  “My baby,” she said. She put her hands on her belly but couldn’t feel any movement. She began to whimper. She tried to sit up, but a knifelike pain shot through her shoulder blades and penetrated through to her chest, stopping her cold and making it even harder for her to catch her breath. She thought she might be having a heart attack. She only vaguely recalled the beating; it seemed to happen in slow motion. She remembered the first blow to the side of her face, the crackling sound between her ears, her body hitting the wall, and the wind being knocked out of her. Then another blow to the side of her head had knocked her out. Yet by the way she felt, she knew the beating hadn’t stopped there. She wasn’t sure how long she had been unconscious. She guessed by the light seeping through the cracks in the blinds that it was only a matter of minutes.