Deja Who

  “But she isn’t afraid of heights or fire or planes or OSHA regulations.”

  “Yes, but she will be. It’s inevitable; she can’t fight her past. It will eventually devour her!”

  “I’m not sure that’s—”

  “So what are you going to do about it? Huh? What? Huh? You take Blue Cross/Blue Shield, right? Right? Right?”

  I think in my baby’s past life I was there, too, except I was Joan Crawford and that’s why my baby is scared of wire coat hangers.

  My preschooler has the attention span of a four-year-old! Obviously he had ADHD in a past life, so you’d better get him started on Ritalin ASAP.

  My teenage son is moody and hates me, but when he was little he was nice and he loved me. Something has gone terribly wrong in his past life and we have to fix it because it’s not normal for teenagers to fight with their parents like this!

  It was a little like patients studying the Internet to diagnose themselves, then telling the doctor the diagnosis and expecting him to fall in line and whip out the scrip pad.

  “Nope,” Archer was saying. “I’ve never needed an Insighter.”

  “Oh. One of those, hmm?”

  “Ah, man,” Cat sighed.

  “What, ‘one of those’?”

  “Don’t do it, Archer,” Cat added.

  “You know what ‘one of those,’” Leah replied. “Are you?”

  “It’s nothing personal. You’re great. It’s just, your job sucks.” He shifted his position. “I think, in general, people can solve their own problems. Or at least be able to try. I think looking back and having regret after regret, being reminded of regret after regret, isn’t helpful and . . . and that’s all, I guess.”

  “You might as well finish,” Cat said kindly as Leah stared fixedly down at him.

  “Well, basically, most Insighters are delusional snoops. ‘Only I can fix you! Only by beating you over the head with all the fuck-ups you can do absolutely nothing about can you get your life in order, so let’s hop to it. That’ll be $149.72, by the way.’” At the look on Leah’s face, he added weakly, “No offense?”

  “We never tell a client to hop to it.” She plopped down on the ground in front of him. “Well. I can’t say I’ve never heard that before. Which explains why I can’t see you. You’re rasa, yes?” Slang for tabula rasa, the blank slate. Or, to put it another way . . . “I can’t see your past lives because your brain isn’t wired to access them. You’re . . .” She paused and groped for the appropriate phrasing.

  “Pure as newborn snow?”

  “You stop mixing metaphors right now,” Cat warned. “Hate that shit.”

  “—life-blind,” Leah finished.

  “Hey!” Archer was pointing at her. “You can’t use that phrase, that’s our phrase. Also, it’s bullshit.”

  “Mmm.” Leah had never met a rasa; now there was one right in front of her and there wasn’t much she could do for him. If Archer couldn’t see his past lives, she could not, either. “Am I the only Insighter you’ve stalked? Um, spent time with?”

  He flashed her a wounded look. “My cousin’s one. She explained why she gets kind of edgy around me.”

  “That’s good, but what does that have to do with Insighters?” Cat asked, grinning. “There’s gotta be lots of reasons people get edgy around you. I’m thinking of half a dozen without even trying.”

  “Hilarious, Your Honor. Anyway, she told me that Insighters can’t see my past lives and it really freaks them out.”

  “Life-blind, huh?” Cat was looking at him thoughtfully. “Jeez. That’s gotta be like . . . I dunno . . . missing a limb or something. Sounds wicked hard.”

  “It’s actually wicked fine. Suits my personal philosophy pretty perfectly.”

  Leah managed a sour smile. This was awfully close to people who weren’t alcoholics being unable to understand why alcoholics can’t control their drinking. Look at me! I just say to myself, Self, don’t have a drink tonight. And I don’t. See? Easy. Now you try.

  She had another theory about this puzzling, interesting man, and it wasn’t that he was life-blind. A most-likely ridiculous theory, but this wasn’t the time to bring it up. And she was probably mistaken. But if she wasn’t . . . she’d never known someone like him before, in all of her lives (that she knew of, at least) and maybe . . .

  Hmm.

  “My sister saw an Insighter every month for years, and it sure as shit didn’t save her. But I never translated that to ‘my sister died anyway, ergo Insighters are useless.’ It’s like telling a cancer patient that because chemo didn’t work for so-and-so, it won’t work for them, either.”

  Leah said nothing. Cat never talked about her family. Ever.

  “I’m sorry,” Archer said after the awkward pause. “How did she die?”

  “Drowned.”

  Another pause while Leah watched Archer scan the older woman’s face. Cat seemed almost preternaturally calm, but then, she often was almost preternaturally calm. “If you don’t mind my asking, how’d it happen?”

  “She was underwater too long.”

  Ohhhhh, boy.

  Archer went from concerned to annoyed back to concerned, shaking his head at the grinning Cat. “I figured that. God, my heart. I feel like I’m tiptoeing across land mines here. I assumed she was a little kid at the time—”

  “Nope. Seventeen.”

  “And?”

  “Drunk.”

  “Ah.”

  “Also high.”

  “Okay.”

  “My point is, sometimes something shitty happens and it doesn’t have anything to do with what happened before.”

  “Correct,” Leah said, “but sometimes it does.”

  SIXTEEN

  My name is Isabella Mowbray.

  Mother is desperate and angry, and hides both behind tight smiles, and so it’s time for the nasty treats. Isabella doesn’t mind; she has been waiting for such things.

  Isabella had eight siblings; they are dead. She had two stepsiblings. They are dead. Her grandmother is dead. Her father is dead. Her stepfather is dead.

  They had weak stomachs. All her brothers and sisters and her father and her grandmother, and her stepfather and stepsiblings, who were no blood relation, which made Isabella wonder if weak stomachs were contagious, they were all cursed with weak stomachs and they are dead, and Isabella’s stomach has hurt for two weeks and she bleeds when she pees.

  She doesn’t mind. It’s lonesome and nerve-racking with just Mother; her strained smiles are terrifying. So is her belly, which is bigger every month. For a while Isabella thought the family stomach weakness had finally caught her mother, too, but eventually realized what was happening and felt better. She’s growing my replacement. When I die she won’t be lonesome.

  So that was all right.

  Isabella knew what was happening to her more or less from the first headaches. She was only ten, but she had always been an observant child. “Owl’s eyes,” her mother teased, “always watching me.” Dreadful pounding headaches like someone was sitting on her chest and hitting her on the top of her head with a rock over and over and over. At first, her greatest fear was that the headaches would kill her, kill her and leave Mother alone. Then her greatest fear was that they would not.

  Head pain, nasty poopies, and tired, all the time tired. Even thinking was exhausting; it was so much easier to lie there and wait for . . . for whatever. Her hair started to fall out, her lovely long dark hair just like Mother’s, and sometimes her body would flail and shake out of her control and that would leave her even more drained, and if she wasn’t so tired she might be scared.

  It would be more frightening if she hadn’t seen it before. This would all be so terribly terribly frightening if she hadn’t seen it before. Like Father, like Daddy George, like Grandmother, like Michael and Jenny and David and L
aura and John and Leah and the little ones whose names she no longer remembered.

  If only it didn’t hurt so much. That’s the only thing, really the only terrible thing. Not the smell or the mess or the weakness: the pain.

  She hasn’t been able to leave the bed for two days; she messes the sheets again. She sees the blood in her mess; she calls her mother over. “It hurts,” she says. Not a complaint. More like an explanation. Here is my problem. I thought you would like to know. And it seems Mother does know. She nods and she bustles back to the kitchen and returns with another small plate of nasty treats: homemade donuts—the whole house smells like hot frying fat and cake dredged through lots of powdered sugar. Isabella’s favorite treat, once upon a time.

  “These will make you feel better.”

  Isabella knows this for a lie, she knows Leah and Jenny and David and Laura and the little ones were told the same lies. But what to do? Not obey? Unthinkable.

  Like the rest of her dead family, she eats.

  SEVENTEEN

  “Aw, man.”

  “Breathe. It will be all right.” Leah was on her knees beside Archer, who was clutching his head in both hands. Cat, unconcerned, had stretched out on the now-unoccupied park bench, lying on her side like a large pinup model in a yellow and black bumblebee sweater (with black sweatpants) and watching Leah soothe him while she munched the last carrot. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have just blurted it all out like—”

  “Your mom killed you in another life? It fucking murdered you in another life?”

  “Yes, but it’s not so bad.” Leah tried for humor, not sure if it would work. “In this life she only killed my stage career. So, improvement. Right?” Nope. No response. A poor time for a joke, as she had suspected. She briefly wished she were better at this sort of thing. “Listen, she’s slightly less terrible in each incarnation, does that help?”

  “No!”

  “Uh, did you hear the one about the mother who killed so many family members reporters actually caught on and tipped off the . . .” Why couldn’t she stop? She saw uncomfortable patients every day, people who couldn’t bear what they were telling her or what she was telling him, and she rarely blinked.

  But poor Archer just looked so anguished . . . and nauseated . . . like he would vomit and then burst into tears. Or burst into tears and then vomit. She could appreciate the sentiment while hoping he did neither.

  “I’m going to throw up on my stab wounds.” Right: vomit, then cry.

  “Terrible idea,” Cat offered from the bench. “You’d be looking at a nasty infection at the least. A pain in the ass.”

  “And you.” Archer’s head shot up. “You’re so relaxed you’re almost in a coma. Didn’t you hear what Leah said? Did you doze off and miss the horrible horrible ending? She died puking and shitting her own blood, for God’s sake, from arsenic-coated donuts! Darsenics! Or arnuts! Fed to her by her mother! This makes Flowers in the Attic look like SpongeBob SquarePants!”

  “I don’t know what either of those are,” Cat replied.

  “You read Flowers in the Attic?” Leah had, of course. She read everything she could find about terrible mothers, starting with Medea and ending with Kris Jenner’s latest biography.

  “No, I saw the terrible movie. God, I’m gonna be sick.”

  Astonished that he should care so much in such a short time about a dead preteen he had never met, Leah drew back. He was so aggravated he didn’t notice. And Cat, as was her way, was unmoved. It was why they were friends. “Bad shit happens. What have we been sayin’? There’s nothing to be done about it now. You’re just a kiddo. You’ll get it eventually.”

  “Ugh, you’re awful, I hate you.” Archer was hiding his face again and out of nowhere Leah wondered how old he was. He seemed much younger than she was, and she hadn’t been paying attention when he was filling out forms in the ER (mostly because of all the shouting). Twenty-three, maybe? Not more than twenty-four, surely. “But it’s good you two are friends. You’re her only friend, did you know?”

  “Yup.” Cat raised an eyebrow at Leah. “Better take your boy home. He’s had a tough week. Stabbed, exposed to your mom, exposed to you, stabbed . . .” The older woman got to her feet with a quick movement that made her seem smaller and younger. “Crazy Betty’s saving a bed for me.”

  “Sister Beatrice’s name is not Cr—”

  “See you tomorrow. Don’t have to bring lunch. You’re fun just for the company.” She poked a long finger at Archer, still on the ground. “You bring lunch.”

  “It’s a date,” he replied dryly, but he managed to smile up at Leah as she extended a hand to help him to his feet. He got up much quicker than she would have expected; his wounds were healing quickly.

  “Come along, then.” It was almost impossible not to smile back at him, but she managed. “I’ll take you home.”

  And she did.

  EIGHTEEN

  She walked with Archer up the sidewalk to his three-story brick house, tucked away in the tony Gold Coast area, the neighborhood so crowded with large lush trees you couldn’t even see the house until you got close. She must have looked curious because he said, while digging for his keys, “I just rent the tower.”

  “The tower?”

  He leaned back and pointed. The third story jutted into a conical tower, big enough around that it was likely a small bedroom. Or a large bathroom. Or a large closet. Why would they make the closet into a tower? Why am I thinking about towers? Does Archer go to sleep every night in a tower, like a prince in a fairy tale? What in God’s name is happening to my life this week?

  By now he’d unlocked the door and swung it wide. “Come in for a minute?”

  She had to smile at his hopeful expression. What a sweet . . . idiot. “I don’t know,” she said demurely as she followed him inside. “Did you hide the pointy cutlery?”

  “I’ll risk it.” He shut the door for her and she found herself in a three-story living room, complete with blinding white walls and a floating staircase. The room seemed even larger because the only furnishing was a black sectional couch big enough to sleep a family of six, and a plasma-screen TV larger than her kitchen table. “Besides, you prob’ly wouldn’t stab me ag— What?”

  Leah was openmouthed. “You live here? But you’re just a kid!”

  He frowned and shook his head, messy bangs tumbling almost into his eyes. “I rent the tower, like I said, but I don’t know for how long—my landlady’s moving and the house is going up for sale. And I’m twenty-eight.”

  I must stop gaping like a moron. “You are not.”

  He sighed. “Don’t you remember what I yelled in the ER?”

  “There was a lot of yelling,” she replied, swallowing fresh guilt.

  “‘I’ve been stabbed seven times so far and I’m not even thirty, if this is what my twenties were like, I dread my thirties, blah-blah.’ Do I have to fish out my driver’s license?”

  Seven times? In one life? She actually thought about it while he groaned and started digging for his wallet. “No, no, I believe you,” she finally said, trying and failing to keep the uncertainty out of her voice.

  “I’m flattered, I think.”

  “I thought you were younger than me.” Much younger.

  “I’m flattered, I think.”

  “You seem so—” Immature. Goofy. Lackadaisical. “—younger than me.”

  Archer laughed. “You’re an old soul, Leah. Literally. Y’know, I hear that phrase all the time but I never really got it. Sounded like one of those things dumb people say when even they don’t know what they’re talking about. But everything you’ve been through—even the stuff you don’t exactly remember, it’s had an effect on the you of now.” He spread his hands like she was arresting him. “Of course I seem younger. I’m not trying to walk around with the weight of all my past mistakes smashing me down. As far as my br
ain’s concerned, there’s just one of me. God, how many of you are there?” He had moved closer and was looking down at her with a wondering smile. “Can you even see them all? Do you know?”

  She shook her head. Five, ten, a dozen, thirty, a hundred, a thousand. Most doomed to die young, doomed to end badly, or begin badly, or get bad in the middle and stupefyingly dull at the end until death was a relief, and why wasn’t she more worried about that? No, what she worried about were the ethical considerations of jumping the bones of someone she’d stabbed repeatedly (was twice “repeatedly”?). And beyond the bone-jumping, ethical or otherwise, was she actually entertaining the thought of pursuing a relationship with the fresh-faced boy who was two years older than she was?

  He can’t see anything about himself, so you can’t, either. You can’t quantify him. He’s an unknown factor and he is throwing you off because he is not someone who keeps happening and happening and happening to you.

  The thought stirred something inside her.

  Not her heart. Lower.

  “I don’t know how many of me there were,” she replied. Her voice sounded, to her ears, too slow. Slurred, almost. Yes, lower than her heart, much much lower. Ummmm . . . “Come here.”

  “Are you okay? You look kind of . . . nnnffff.”

  I am not considering pursuing a relationship. I merely want to bang him. Repeatedly.

  NINETEEN

  Weird day weird day weird day weird goddamned day!

  That was about all Archer had time for while Leah was backing him into the empty living room, snogging him

  (mental note: stop watching so much BBC)

  like she was—ha, ha!—gonna get murdered tomorrow. Or something. One of Elaine’s lines from Seinfeld

  (God, is that why I’m crushing so hard on Leah? she reminds me of a dour Elaine? God, what if she dances as horribly as Elaine does, the whole “full body dry heave set to music” thing? that would be so hot)