“It’s okay,” I told her soothingly in an array of languages until she seemed to understand. “I’m your friend.” She was probably six or seven, but she looked much younger because she was starving. She didn’t want to come with me, so I sat with her there. I wanted to buy her food and drink and clothing, but I was afraid to leave her, knowing she would disappear if I turned my head.
We sat there for a long time. I talked to her and told her stories about her and me until the sun ended and the moon began. I held her until she fell asleep. Her heart was skipping along so rapidly and her breathing was so quick, I put my hand to her head and realized she was burning with fever. I brought her back to the villa where I stayed and called the finest Arab doctor in the city. When we laid her on a bed we discovered that some grisly accident had befallen her. Her left arm was almost completely severed above her elbow. The wound was badly wrapped and gravely infected. I nursed her and sat with her and watched her die two days later. There was nothing to be done.
I didn’t find her for a long time after that. Not for almost five hundred years. I was afraid that her soul had finished. The kind of life she’d suffered would be hard to rally from. You see, while some souls go out with the achievement of wholeness or balance, others end out of pure discouragement. As I’ve said, it’s desire more than anything else that keeps us coming back for more. When your business is finished for better or worse, that is usually the last of you.
In my shameless heart, I’ve always hoped that Sophia and I would become whole together. I hate that phrase (along with the term “soul mates”), but I can’t think of a better way to say it. I’ve always thought I could erase my sins and make myself a better person through her. I’ve had the gall to think I could love her better than anyone else could. I’ve always feared she would find completion without me, and I’d be around, stupid and unperfected, forever.
Finally, I came to England. On the last day of the nineteenth century, I was born in the English countryside, near Nottingham. I was fairly delighted to find myself there. Though the sun never set on the British Empire, I had not been her subject before. My mother took care of her children and her garden. I had three sisters, one of whom had been a very dear uncle to me in France and another who had been my wife, which was awkward.
My father worked in a textile factory, and as a hobby he raced pigeons. He kept a loft behind the house and raised them from stock that had been in his family for more than two centuries. I wasn’t interested in the racing or the hunting but was captivated by the flying and especially the homing capabilities of the birds. I was also fascinated by the prospect of flying men.
Percy Pilcher, the late glider pilot, was an early hero of mine, and when I was nine years old I remember excitedly following the progress of Wilbur and Orville Wright, begging my father to take us to Le Mans for the first public demonstration.
When the Great War began I fantasized about training pigeons to carry messages and medicine across enemy lines, and in fact the British and every side in that war relied on pigeons, but I was young and strong and came from the working class—ideal frontline fodder. I was a loyal subject of the crown and so eager to do my bit I would have enlisted as a powder monkey at sixteen if that’s what it took, and probably gotten myself killed at Passchendaele or Verdun. As it was, I had to wait until 1918 to join up as an infantryman, and I didn’t manage to confront death until the second battle of the Somme later that year. It feels very recent to me.
There’s a lot I could say about that time, but I’ll tell you I was both gassed and shot in that battle and left unconscious in the infamous mud, the closest I’ve come to death without quite dying. When I woke up I found myself blinking in sunshine, light streaming through a massive antique window. At the sight of my stirring—my first sign of life in several days, I was later told—a young woman in a white nurse’s cap rushed over to me. I blinked and refocused to see a face hovering over mine of such loveliness and deep familiarity I thought I dreamed her. I would have believed I were in heaven, had I not experienced the actual afterlife (pre-life, inter-life) so many times.
She put her hand on mine, and somehow I thought that meant she remembered me, too. “Sophia,” I gasped blearily, my heart surging in confused ecstasy. “It’s me.”
Her look was not so much recognition as pity. I was half dead and disoriented but not so disoriented that I couldn’t tell. “My name is Constance,” she whispered to me. I could feel the tiny bursts of her breath on my skin. “I am glad you woke up.”
It was her. It really was. Was she truly glad? I wondered. Was it possible I was familiar to her? Did she have any idea how important she was to me?
“Dr. Burke will be so pleased. We had another boy in your unit wake yesterday, and now you.”
I was another boy in hospital, I realized. I was potentially one fewer death. I absorbed her pretty accent and her neat white smock. “Are you a nurse?” I asked her.
“Not a full nurse,” she said, both modest and proud. “But training to be.”
Her manner was so familiar and so sweet to me. I wanted to tell her so badly, but I didn’t want to send her hurrying in another direction before I even really got to look at her.
“Where are we?” I asked. I raised my eyes to the large window and the elegantly coffered ceiling.
“We’re at Hastonbury. Kent.”
“In England?”
“Yes, in England.”
“It looks like a palace,” I said, unable to catch much breath.
“It’s just a country house,” she said. Her eyes darted downward and then back to me. “But it’s a hospital now.”
I realized I was breathless and my chest ached terribly. Other aches filed up to the surface. I tried to remember what had happened to me. In all the years I’d been involved in war, phosgene and mustard gas were not part of it. As elated as I was to see Sophia, I suddenly feared how she was seeing me. “Am I in one piece?” I asked.
She looked me over. “A bit banged up, but all of your parts seem to be in their proper places,” she said. There was a hint of nervy good humor there, I felt almost sure.
“No burns?”
She winced almost imperceptibly. “Some blistering but no serious burns. You’re very fortunate in that.”
I tried moving my legs. It brought a wash of pain, but they were still under my body and still in my command. I could feel her hand on mine. No numbness or paralysis there. I started to feel hopeful. I had Sophia right there with me, and I wasn’t dead or disfigured.
She put her hand on my forehead, and I felt that my skin was slick with sweat. Her tenderness gave me another kind of ache in the chest and the throat. Did she know me at all?
“Come, Constance. Get on with your rotation,” said an older woman, probably a full nurse, who was nowhere near as pretty in voice, looks, or manner as Sophia.
Sophia looked up suddenly. “Patient . . .” She looked down at the chart. “D. Weston has woken, ma’am,” she said eagerly. “Shall I tell Dr. Burke?”
The nurse didn’t appear to find this news as exciting as Sophia did. “I’ll tell him,” she said, looking at me critically.
“Yes, Nurse Foster,” Sophia replied.
I hated for Sophia to take her hand from mine, and I hated it when she walked to the next bed and put it on the forehead of the next boy in my row. My neck hurt too badly to turn it far, but that much I saw. I could hear how she spoke to him and how his spirits rose at the sight of her.
Indeed, I was another smashed-up boy in hospital, and she was the tenderhearted nurse in training who made us think of love and gave us all hope. She didn’t know she was Sophia, and she didn’t know I was me. But we were in the same place at the same time in our lives, and for that alone I was inexpressibly buoyant and a few hundred years’ worth of grateful.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2007
LUCY TOOK A few wrong turns, but ultimately she found it. It had been almost exactly a year since she had been there, and the roses
were more abundant. The grass was longer. She knocked on the door to the trailer, but no one answered it. There was no car other than hers in sight.
Lucy couldn’t just go home. She’d packed up her stuff and moved out of the dorm two days before. She’d spent the two nights at Marnie’s summer apartment on Bolling Avenue, and now the car was packed to take her back to Hopewood for the next three months. This was her only chance. She got back in her hot, overstuffed car and waited. What am I doing here? She felt like a stalker.
How the mighty are fallen, she thought to herself. A year ago she hadn’t had have the remotest confidence in Madame Esme, and now she was staked out in front of her sad-looking trailer that didn’t have any wheels, pinning her hopes on what Madame Esme might say.
Lucy leaned her cheek against the window and had almost fallen asleep when she heard a car pulling into the driveway. It was an old rusted red Nissan. It took Lucy a moment to decide that the girl who got out was the same girl who called herself Madame Esme.
Lucy got out of her car and intercepted the girl on her way to her front door.
“Excuse me? Sorry to pounce on you, but—”
The girl turned, and Lucy saw she was wearing a dark blue polo-style shirt with the Wal-Mart logo in white thread. Her name tag said hi, her name was Martha.
“I came to see you once before,” Lucy continued. “A year ago. You go by Madame Esme, right?”
The girl nodded slowly. She didn’t show any obvious sign of remembering Lucy, nor did she look pleased.
“I’m sorry to just show up like this. You did a reading for me. I don’t know if you remember. Probably not. You probably do a lot of these. So . . .”
The girl shrugged. Lucy thought the whole Madame Esme getup had been kind of silly, but in retrospect it had also been formidable and strange. Without it, this girl looked terribly young and small. Lucy noticed the bruise on her jaw and wondered about it. She found her hand floating up to her own jaw protectively.
“Listen, I’ve thought a lot about the things you told me. I was hoping I could ask you a couple of questions. Or if maybe you could do another reading. I brought money.”
The girl was shaking her head before Lucy could finish. “Sorry. No.”
“But, could you . . .” Lucy’s voice was trembling. She didn’t know what to do. Her arrival here was a desperate act. She who had disdained, doubted, and mocked Madame Esme had finally capitulated. Esme/Martha here was three parts nutjob, but Lucy needed her. Lucy had dropped to the bottom of sanity’s barrel. She hadn’t even thought of the further humiliation of getting turned down. Not with fifty bucks in her pocket.
“Could I just ask some questions?” Lucy asked. “You probably don’t remember me, but you said a lot of really strange things, and as I said, I’ve been thinking about them. I didn’t understand them at all, but I think—”
The girl was shaking her head again. Lucy realized the girl looked not so much uninterested as uncomfortable. She stared at Lucy carefully as Lucy kept talking.
“Are you not in the business anymore?” Lucy asked.
She shook her head. “It’s not that. I just don’t want to.”
“You don’t need the whole outfit and setup and everything, do you? I mean, I don’t mind if you don’t mind. And if you do need to get set up, I could wait. I could just—”
“You should go,” Esme/Martha said in a low voice. She turned and walked to her door.
Lucy’s distress was overwhelming. This was the last resort. What did you do when you couldn’t even surrender?
“Please,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry to ambush you like this. I realize how weird that seems. I don’t mean to bother you, but if I could just—could I come back at a better time? I could make an appointment. I should have done that, but I don’t have your number.” Lucy held up her bag. “I have money,” she said again, less confidently.
The girl was standing in her open doorway, looking over her shoulder at Lucy. Lucy saw compassion there but also wariness.
“My name is Lucy, but you called me Sophia. Do you remember me at all?”
“I have to go inside,” the girl said.
Lucy couldn’t do anything but walk herself to the car and get in it. There was nothing else to do. On one level, Lucy had hoped to find some answers. Short of that, she had hoped to prove to herself that Madame Esme was full of crap, clueless, possibly lucky, and driven by greed. She got less than neither.
She slumped into her car and cast a last hopeless look at the trailer. Esme/Martha was still standing in the doorway. She looked about as happy and comfortable as Lucy felt. Lucy was poised to close the door, but she saw the girl’s mouth moving. She leaned out of the car.
“He’s not dead.”
“I’m sorry?” Lucy asked, astonishment dawning.
“I’m just saying. He’s not dead.”
Lucy was holding the door so hard her fingers were numb. “You mean Daniel?”
The girl didn’t say anything more. She closed the door behind her forcefully.
HASTONBURY HALL, ENGLAND, 1918
I lived from one Sophia shift to the next. Breakfast porridge was a delicacy when she brought it and tasteless slop when if came from Nurse Foster or Jones or even the young, lumpy Corinne. When Sophia touched my head or my hands or administered medicine, I felt my entire body turning inside out. There was nothing I could or would keep from her; I didn’t have the strength.
Sophia’s purview was strictly shoulders up and wrists down. The older nurses did the earthier duties, the bedpans and the washing and the changing of dressings. They were rushed and dismissive, and it frustrated me, honestly, to be at their mercy. My head was so full of experiences, opinions. I had lived in ancient cities and sailed across the world and read books on the first parchment in the library of Pergamum, and I needed a bedpan. They saw me for what I was: another eighteen-year-old soldier with a ravaged body.
I wasn’t used to being gravely injured. I had wounds and aches in all my lives that dogged me, like anyone else. But the serious wounds I died of. Medical science wasn’t what it is now. There wasn’t usually a long transition or a lot of fanfare between life and death, as there is now.
But apart from impatience at my own weakness, I confess that it interested me. Huge advances were being made in medical care, and I paid attention. It set the theme for my next few lives. I have a natural bent for science, but probably the real reason I turned to medicine is because the care I got in that hospital came from such beloved hands.
Now that I was awake and no longer had the freshest of wounds, I was moved to a room upstairs. It was a large chamber with yellow walls and four other beds. It looked out onto a garden. I could see a slice of green mixed with autumn red if I sat up tall in my bed. The windows were large and let in a beautiful leafy light, even when it rained. Somewhere under the smell of antiseptic and ammonia, I smelled a faint trace of Sophia and I held on to it, the thinnest thread of it, through my feverish dreams.
At nights my fever was worst, but I didn’t mind it, because Sophia sometimes came to sit with me.
“Sophia,” I murmured as she held my hand. It was the third night in my new room.
“Constance,” she whispered back.
I looked up at her. “Your eyes are blue now.”
“They were always blue.”
“No, they were once black.”
“Oh?”
“Yes, and equally beautiful.”
“That’s a relief.”
“Your hair was longer last time, and not in those . . . things you wear.”
“Combs?”
“Yes. It was darker, but your eyes were really the same.”
“I thought they were black.”
“Yes, different color but the same. Same in the important ways. Same person when you looked into them.”
She nodded. My fevers went so high that she humored me in everything.
“I saw you last when you were a very small girl. I think you were six.” r />
“How could that be? You didn’t grow up here in Kent, did you?” she asked.
“No, it was in Greece that I saw you.”
“I’ve never been to Greece.”
“Yes, you have. You had an awful time.” My fever was like a truth serum. I felt tears filling my eyes, but I didn’t let them go. “I tried to help you.” I had a thought. “Let me see your arm.” I closed my eyes and tried to picture it. “Your left arm.”
She put it out reluctantly.
“Lift your sleeve. You have a mark there, I am sure. Right there.” I pointed to the spot on the sleeve of her sweater.
She looked at me carefully. The patients weren’t supposed to be asking her to show more of her skin, and she wasn’t supposed to be doing it. But she was curious. She took off her cardigan sweater, nice English green wool, and lifted her cotton sleeve high up on her arm to show me. I was watching her so hard I made her blush.
On the delicate underside of her arm, a little ways below her armpit, was a brown birthmark laid out lengthwise along the curve. I wanted to touch it, but I held back. It is an intimate stretch of a person’s skin, rarely out and about, especially for an English girl.
“How did you know?” she asked. “Did you see it before?”
“How could I have seen it before?”
She shrugged. “In Greece.”
I laughed as much as my lungs allowed. “Yes. It was worse then.” I felt the tears again. A fever combined with a girl you’ve loved and haven’t seen in five hundred years can just lay you bare.
“What happened?”
I didn’t really want to tell her about it. “I hate to think. I don’t know. You must have had a negligent mother, if you had one at all.”
She was struck by that. “And now?”
“Your mother?”
She looked solemn. “No, the birthmark. Why do I have it now?”
“Well. It’s a strange thing. With each birth your body starts out fresh and mostly blank, but then you print yourself on it, over time. You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too.” I glanced up at her. “And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin. You carry your past with you even if you don’t remember any of it.”