Chapter 1

“WE’RE LOSING HER!”

The words caromed around inside my head like a housefly trapped in a Coke bottle. We’re losing her, losing her, losing her. Such a commotion – the urgent voices and the clang-a-bang bustle. I hid behind my eyes and followed the words as they rattled around in the darkness. Weeeeee’re loooooooosing herrrrrrrrrr!

I must surely have been smiling and tapping my feet to the rhythm as the lyrics ricocheted from wall-to-wall in the attic of my mind. We-we-we (Bop!) loo-loo-loo (Oh Yeah!) we-loo, we-loo, we-loo-loo-loo her (Oh No!). But I couldn’t tell. My body seemed somehow to have been misplaced. No tapping feet, no sing-along smile. Maybe they’d been lost, too, gone off with whoever it was those urgent voices were afraid of losing.

Curious now, I drifted up to the far corner of the room, free as a dandelion puff on a summer breeze. The room was awash in brilliant white light, and it made the people with the urgent voices sparkle like the teeth in a toothpaste commercial. Like angels without wings, they hovered over the broken lady on the narrow gurney in the middle of the room. The broken lady was white, too, but more like the white of curdled milk.

How funny. The broken lady was right there in the middle of the room where the angels without wings could see her and touch her, and still they were losing her. We-we-we (Bop!) loo-loo-loo (Oh No!).

Looking down from my perch up near the ceiling, I gradually began to comprehend why I couldn’t tap my feet or put on my smile. The broken lady had them.

The broken lady never did give me back my feet. And she kept my smile for a very long time. She might never have given that back either had it not been for Maggie. Maggie and The Healing Tree.