Shelly's Second Chance (The Wish Granters, Book One) Read online

  Shelly’s Second Chance

  The Wish Granters, Book One

  By L B Gschwandtner

  *****

  This book is a work of fiction. All locations, characters, names, brands, media, and incidents used in this book are either the product of the author’s imaginations or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. Any use of the above is entirely the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or people living or dead is purely coincidental.

  ISBN 978-0-939-613-46-5

  Copyright 2011 by L B Gschwandtner

  *****

  Acknowledgements

  The author wishes to thank our beta readers for offering suggestions.

  Thanks also to Katerina Vamvasaki for cover design.

  The Wish Granters, Book One

  Shelly’s Second Chance

  Chapter One

  It’s true what they say. You never hear the bullet that’s meant for you.

  In Alanna’s case, it was a wave.

  She was riding the surf at Delray Beach where she swam almost every day, but especially when the water rose up in a fury as the tide began to turn. It was her favorite time to swim and that day the ocean was wild. Even though it pulled her out, it also pushed her back in and, with every swell, she felt the tug in one direction and then the other, waves heaving at her with enough power that she had to fight to stay in place. It was enormous, this pulling at her body. She could feel the earth’s rhythm in its force.

  Everything has a rhythm. When you find the one that’s right for you, life falls into place with a kind of destiny. Maybe Alanna hadn’t found her rhythm yet. Maybe that explained the wave that clipped her.

  Later she would think she shouldn’t have gone in alone that day. At least not there, so far from the protected part of the beach where the lifeguards monitored swimmers. But she walked the beach almost every morning, knew every inch of it, and Alanna always swam where no one else would go. She knew the sandbars and the rip holes, the places where a woman could be alone with her thoughts and the pounding water. The beach was hers, the surf her domain; the sun was shining; the day was perfect. When the ragged waves, the ones she couldn’t body surf, rose up in front of her, she dove as deep as she could through the crumbling curl and came up like a dolphin, sputtering on the back side. Then she turned to watch the wave retreat, rumble toward shore, its big hump in front of her obscuring a view of anything but the hill of blue, glittering in the sun.

  And that’s where it happened. On a beautiful April morning, on the sunny beach where she’d ridden the waves happily so many times before.

  She had just cleared a huge one. The swells were getting higher and deeper. She was on her way in—there’s the irony—and swimming an oblique line back toward the shore. It was slow going, but she knew from past experience that it was better than meeting the outgoing waves head on. That would have been too exhausting, fighting the tide as it pulled to the other side of the earth. How could one slender woman confront a force like that anyway?

  The wave that clipped her by surprise was far taller than any of the others that day, almost as if it had her name on it. It roiled over her head—not a clean curl at all, but foamy, rough, and full of anger. Before she realized she was under it, slam, it knocked out whatever reserve of air she had in her lungs. When she gasped, she took in a single rush of sea water, breathing it deep into her body. Did she struggle for seconds? Minutes? It was impossible to know, and soon enough Alanna was beyond caring. The wave gave her up to a greater force, a force that was beyond even the ocean’s power.

  What surprised her was how easily it happened. How quickly the point comes where you no longer want to struggle, where you’re relieved not to think about it anymore. What’s the use? Most worry in life comes down to this. When it will happen to you. What it will feel like. Whether there will be pain, fear, loss.

  And, of course, that nagging little question of where you go next.

  Some of the stories are true it seems, because flashes of her life did slip by Alanna on that sunny day. Alanna as a little girl at the beach with her parents. Laughing and pushing away from her mother, even then wanting to ride the surf on her own. Alanna looking way out to the horizon where the ocean met the sky, Alanna knowing all her life that she’d been born for this water.

  But where she landed there was no surf and no sun. Just a pale soft glow tinged with a pink, powdery mist at what seemed like the edge of some undefined lake. Not a horizon, but more of a sheer drop. As if she were looking over a waterfall.

  *****

  It wasn’t like that for Joe. Not at all.

  One minute he was cruising down the road, talking on his cell.

  “Listen, make sure the Osborne file is on my desk and call the insurance company to set up a meeting for Friday morning,” he was telling his assistant, Vera, as the truck appeared just to the left of the very edge of his field of vision. So yeah, he saw it coming, but it was all so fast there was no time to react. No time to take evasive action, or even to cry out. He dropped the phone.

  Miles away, Vera frowned and asked, “Mr. Taft? Are you still there?” but she was not overly concerned. Joe’s calls often ended in mid sentence. He’d always called back.

  That was one moment and the next he was somewhere else. Or, more precisely, he just wasn’t anymore. Nothing passed before his eyes, not one memory of his first love or the triumphant moment when he ran a football into the end zone. The only thing he heard was the screech of brakes as the truck careened toward his car from the side, and the eerie sense that he was watching it happen to someone else. And he remembered thinking, “So this is what they call an out of body experience.” And then, just like that, there was no longer any body to be out of. He wondered later if there had been a lot of blood and where he had been struck. There was no momentary hovering over the scene, no feeling of a soul leaving his body, no bemused watching the poor people scrambling around the accident. It was just, poof. Easy, fast and miraculously painless.

  Where he landed was a mystery. He seemed to float around for a time with the sensation that he was supposed to do something but he had no idea what. There he stood—or was he floating still—enveloped in the pale pink mist and he noticed the quiet. The enormous silence of wherever he was struck him in contrast to the noise of the world he’d left behind only moments before. Then he saw, way off in the distance, the shape of a woman in the mist and he felt drawn in that direction. What drew him, he couldn’t say but the pull toward her was undeniable and he did not struggle against it.

  Chapter Two

  April was going to be a good month for Shelly. Winter was a dim memory and the days were getting longer. The blossoming trees were in full flower and she had a feeling Ben was about to set the date. Everyone she knew agreed this was the right guy at the right time for all the right reasons. She was sure all their friends would accept an invitation to the engagement weekend celebration at Lions Crossing Inn. Nothing said class, acceptance, belonging, like Lions Crossing. Shelly had it made. Or so everyone thought. It was what they didn’t know that defined the real Shelly. And there was a lot they didn’t know.

  It was late evening. She’d left work two hours ago and was supposed to have gone straight to her meeting. But she’d dawdled, stopped at a restaurant where an acquaintance worked behind the bar, had a glass of wine, checked the Super Lotto
numbers she’d bought. There was a huge prize waiting for some lucky winner but no one had claimed it yet so she was still in the running. She knew she shouldn’t, knew Ben wouldn’t like it, especially since that fifty dollars for tickets was supposed to help pay her next car insurance installment.

  So yeah, maybe she was a little late. The meeting had started an hour ago. Shelly slowly walked up the three steps to the entrance of the Unitarian church. She hadn’t been to a meeting for weeks now and had only come tonight because . . . well why had she gone there tonight? It wasn’t like she didn’t have anything else to do. If she thought about it, she would have concluded that she began to feel jittery somewhere in her gut when she clicked on the Lotto site and chose her numbers. That feeling was a tell and she should have listened to it.

  Inside the meeting room, someone named Rick was detailing the hundreds of ways he’d screwed up his life.

  “. . . and then when my wife walked out things really fell apart.”

  Shelly sat down in the back row and dropped her bag on the floor next to her chair.

  “I lost my house, my car, my job, and all my savings. My youngest kid was only . . .”

  Shelly sighed. She’d heard stories like this before.

  “Hi Shelly.” A whisper next to her. She turned to face Marcus, her sponsor. “How have you been?”

  This question was code. He wanted to know if she’d fallen off the wagon. If she’d come back because her life had spiraled out of control. Well it hadn’t. Everything was going great. Marcus slipped into the chair at her side and Shelly sighed, turning back to try to focus on Rick, who was now starting to cry.

  But her mind kept going to Ben. He was a generous and trusting soul, open and enthusiastic, and yet . . . Whenever she thought of Ben and their upcoming marriage Shelly felt a confusing mix of hope and fear. She had found a great guy. Great in bed and great out of bed. The perfect mix of stud and soul mate, and what else could any girl want? So why couldn’t she tell him the truth? The whole truth, with all the inconvenient little details.

  Of course, if she did, there was the chance he wouldn’t see her in the same way. He could get angry and he’d be justified if he did. He might even accuse her of misleading him, of pretending to be one thing when she was really something else. Shelly knew she needed to come clean with Ben but every time she’d say “We really need to talk,” he would laugh and tell her she was just getting pre-marital jitters. He would pull her to him and kiss her silent. Ben had no doubt they were headed toward a wonderful future. He had enough confidence for both of them. At least for now.

  The man named Rick was still blubbering up there at the lectern.

  “It got so bad I actually started planning my own death. For the life insurance. For my kids. So they could go to college. It was the only thing I had left. At least it was something.”

  He stopped talking and looked out at the small sea of faces. Some people clapped. Others told him he’d done really well tonight. It’s pathetic, Shelly thought. All these people pouring their problems out to each other. She wasn’t like them. She could stop anytime.

  “You know what they say,” Marcus leaned in so she could hear him above the congratulatory voices. “The first step is admitting you have a problem.” He leaned away and folded his hands in his lap.

  For a brief moment, Shelly hated him.

  Chapter Three

  “Name?”

  “Alanna Elisabeth Roberts.”

  “Alanna is all we need.” The man was seated at a wide table and wearing a gray robe, the hood of which obscured his face and made him look like a medieval monk. He wrote in a huge book in careful script with a pen dipped in an old-fashioned inkwell.

  “Where am I?” Alanna asked, looking around. There were no clouds, no angels. No harps or billowing mist. If this was heaven, it sure wasn’t living up to the hype.

  “Doesn’t matter. You’re leaving right away.” As he raised a hand in the air, a vague, fleeting recognition came to her, almost as if she knew him from somewhere. And just as he promised, Alanna felt a wave pulling her onward. But this wave was soft and silent, not at all like the surf she had left behind.

  The second space was less ethereal and more clinical. Everything seemed clean, as if it had never been used, and there was the scent of—what was it? Oranges maybe. “I’m the senior coordinator. I’ll be with you for the duration.”

  Alanna looked up to see a man clothed in something that looked like a doctor’s coat, except that it was a dusty yellow, a color that reminded her of pollen. He seemed familiar too, and that was puzzling. Was this the same man who’d written her name in the book with the quill pen? Had he somehow swapped his robes for a medical jacket? And what did he mean by “the duration?”

  “You’ve been paired with someone else who’s just arrived,” the man was saying briskly, giving her no time for questions. The two of you will be given certain tasks to accomplish together. We find that works better you know, two people, more of a team.”

  “But I don’t under-”

  “You and your partner will have a little time to get used to your new surroundings,” the senior coordinator went on. “You’ll be going to Transition shortly.”

  He stamped Alanna’s palm with what looked like a rose and she found herself floating again. It felt like being a little drunk on wine. Her stamped hand reminded her of college, of the frat parties out on the lawn, and she realized her memory was returning in tiny fragments. Something caught her eye. The oddest thing. This third place felt like some sort of ethereal park, a garden, and it was just as pristine as the others. Yet there were random scraps of paper moving around her feet, as if litter was being scattered by an imperceptible breeze. She bent to pick one up. On it were some scribbled words—her address when she was nine, the make of her first car, an old friend’s name. Memories that floated away as the scrap of paper left her hand.

  She looked up to see the senior coordinator, this time in a business suit. So he had been traveling with her and taking various guises. A monk, then a doctor and now—he looked more like a lawyer or an accountant. It seemed like a good time to ask some questions so she cleared her throat.

  “Exactly what is this place? I know you called it Transition, but from what—and to where?”

  He did not speak. Only shuffled some papers.

  “I guess I died,” Alanna finally said, when it was clear no answer was coming.

  “Not quite,” he said, looking up with a kind smile. “Everything will become clear soon enough. What you need to know now is this. Your next step will be to meet your partner and the two of you will be given your assignment. It’s very simple, really. You have become one of a select group known as The Wish Granters.”

  “I don’t understand.” Alanna said, struggling to keep her voice calm. “What does it mean to be not quite dead? And what’s a Wish Granter?”

  “Patience,” said the coordinator. “You’ll have to be patient for this assignment. We know it will be hard for you, but, if it’s any consolation, it will be even harder for your partner. Here.” He handed Alanna what looked like a folder. “The details of your first assignment are in here. But you won’t have to study the whole file. Just touching it will be enough to give you whatever you need to know when you need to know it.”

  The senior coordinator smiled again, and the corners of his eyes crinkled in a way that was comforting, almost grandfatherly. “Your partner Joe’s file contains additional information, so the two of you will have to rely on each other.”

  “But I don’t want a partner,” Alanna protested. “I never have.” And as she said the word “partner” she felt a sudden pressure in her chest, a tight closed-in feeling as if she’d been zipped into clothes a size too small. It was precisely the sensation that had come over her as she’d looked down at the rose stamp in her hand. Memory can hurt, she realized.

  “I always do better on my own,” she said, more firmly this time. It would be a mistake to appear weak before the
senior coordinator. It was clear that whoever he was, he had influence on what would happen to her next.

  “Like with that wave?” He asked sharply and what could Alanna say to that? She took the folder and, before she knew what had happened, she had absorbed everything in it and knew what she had to do. It was really quite amazing, she was thinking to herself, that so much had happened so fast. But had it really happened fast? She had no sense of time anymore. Wherever this place was, it had no clocks, no calendars, no rising and setting sun. She looked down and saw that she was wearing a dress—pretty she thought, with small, colorful flowers on a peachy cream background—and that seemed odd, too, because she had been in a bathing suit at the beach. The beach. Another memory, but this one didn’t feel like a burden.

  *****

  “So I guess it’s me and you, huh?”

  The partner Alanna did not want now stood in front of her. She was relieved to see he looked human, and nearly as disoriented and confused as she was.

  In fact, he was not only human, he was kind of cute. Joe, wasn’t that what the senior coordinator had called him? Tough but not rough. Lean and agile looking. Hair almost black and gray-green eyes under straight brows that gave his face a slightly quizzical look. He seemed a little older than Alanna—well, okay, that was a description that no longer made any sense, but he seemed a little older than she had been on the day she had entered the surf. Which would put him in his early thirties and he had the look of a jock, with broad shoulders and a ruddy face. Nose had been broken at some point, that was plain, but there was still something appealing about him. Appealing and reassuring, because he was the first normal thing she’d seen since that wave hit her.