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

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.