Excerpt from chapter one:
He took his time. Pregnancy test in hand, he was back - in about twenty
minutes.
"Helen - I've got it. Do you want to do it now?" He asked.
"Ok," she said, and disappeared into the bathroom. She came
out and they waited the prescribed six minutes.
"Negative?" he said. He couldn't believe it. Negative, again.
Helen didn't say anything, but she wasn't upset. She was humming, then
she started singing. She said, "It's wrong."
"What do you mean, its wrong?" he asked.
She said, "I mean it's wrong. What do you think I mean?"
"How can it be wrong? It says right here 99.95% accurate. That's
pretty accurate. That's one in…two thousand times it's wrong. It's
probably right," he said.
"Whatever. It must be the .05%. It's just wrong this time, I know
it," she says. She's smiling. She's actually grinning, as if it had
been positive. She's positive.
"Well, I guess we'll know…soon enough?" He wondered. He
seemed to be wondering a lot these days. Time would tell.
In a few weeks, Helen started to have visions when meditating. Now, it's
not uncommon for people to have visions meditating. Plenty of experienced
meditators report experiences of colored lights, a single point of light,
a rushing feeling, a feeling of disappearing, or intense visual experiences,
similar to a dream state, only more lucid, more memorable. Tibetan Buddhist
monks have a highly developed visual meditative skill which they incorporate
in their tantric rituals. He'd read all about it, and over the past three
years, he'd even experienced some detailed visualizations of deities and
places. But there was always a surreal aspect. Helen was having visions
unlike any he had heard about, let alone experienced. She said they had
"depth and clarity, just like real things."
"It's like I could reach out and touch the people and places in the
visions. They are places I have never been, things I've never seen. I
don't know where they come from. It looks like Asia, but I'm not really
sure. The people look Indian, mostly. Sometimes they look Chinese,"
she said.
They considered the visions as just another step, of progress in her spiritual
pursuits, and he actually felt a twinge of jealousy, so he started "meditating
harder" which of course didn't help. One really can't force these
things. He resigned himself to the fact that he was a bit behind her and
relaxed, finding his pace in his meditation again, taking his time.
Weeks turned to months, and about four months after "that day",
there really was no doubt any more. Helen was pregnant. She hadn't menstruated
since that night. They took two more store-bought pregnancy tests - still
negative. Finally she went to her ob/gyn and got an ultrasound at about
eighteen weeks after. The ultrasound confirmed what they already knew,
and what Helen knew almost from day one, that she was pregnant. There
was something unusual about the ultrasound, however. There was a bright
envelope - a white band of light area surrounding the image of the fetus.
The tech at the hospital could not explain it and said they were going
to double check the ultrasound equipment. Helen and Steven were not too
surprised, as they were beginning to get used to these little anomalies
in their lives. Next to the flowerprints, this was not a huge shocker.
