“There were thousands, tens of thousands, of them in all colors. And you should have seen the flowers. I was very small, but I would just lie here and let the butterflies land on every part of me and try not to laugh when they tickled.”
“I wish I had seen it,” I said, watching the slow flap of the butterfly’s wings on her boot.
“My mother made it. She was famous for the gardens she made.”
“Was she?”
“Yes. And for being beautiful. And reckless.”
“Reckless?”
“She liked fast things. My father said she had jumpy legs, because she couldn’t stand still even for a second.”
We thought about that for a while. I wanted to be careful.
“And what about the butterflies? What happened to them?”
“They went after she died. My father didn’t try to keep up the gardens after she was gone.”
My carefulness hadn’t helped me. I wished I hadn’t asked that question. It cast us out of the shelter of that moment and back into the wash of time. Time was loss, and Sophia had suffered too much of it.
She didn’t lift her head, but I felt the sadness of her body pressed against mine, and I was too weak to resist it. It filled me, too.
“I love you,” I told her. “More than anything. I always have.”
I heard the wetness in her breathing. I lifted my hand to her face and felt her tears.
“I love you,” she said.
Those were words I had waited lifetimes to hear, but they gave me a deep ache. I wished she didn’t. She had lost too much already. I wished I had died in the muddy valley of the river Somme and not made her lose one more thing.
FOR TWO DAYS I went in and out of feverish sleep. Sophia was there. I saw her when I opened my eyes and felt her when I couldn’t. I wondered if she had been fired from her nursely duties, she was with me so constantly. I talked to her, and she talked to me, but I have only the blurriest idea of what we said.
And then I woke up. My body ached, I could barely get air, but my head was clear. Sophia was initially ecstatic when she saw me sitting up with my eyes open. The innocence of her response was both a joy and an agony to me.
But on further examination, she must have known that the color of my skin wasn’t right. My breathing wasn’t right. Dr. Burke said something to her in a low voice outside my door, and her manner changed when she came back in. Her eyes were full, and her mouth was pressed into a cooperative shape.
“Back again, are you?” I asked her teasingly, talking in a low voice to suppress an upheaval of fluid and coughing. “Haven’t you gotten yourself tossed out yet for spending too much time with patient D. Weston?”
“They can’t really toss me, can they? They can’t spare an extra set of hands. And it’s touchy, being that it is my house.”
“But tell me the nurses are giving you a respectably hard time at least.”
“I think they understand how I feel about D. Weston.” She touched my ear tenderly. “All the nurses say you are the most handsome we’ve got.”
I smiled because I didn’t have the air to laugh anymore. “Is that what you talk about?”
She sat on my bed quietly for a while. Her face had turned solemn. “I want to go with you,” she said.
I put my hands on her waist. “What do you mean, my darling?”
“I want to go where you’re going. I’m not scared of dying. I want to stay together and come back together. You said that souls cohere. I want to stay with you.”
“Oh, Sophia.” I kissed her ribs through her sweater. I pressed my face into her abdomen. “You can’t take your own life.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’re young and beautiful and healthy, and you can’t. Anyway, rebirth comes from wanting to live. Suicide is rejection; it’s the end. If death is truly what you choose, you might not come back after that.”
“But I don’t want to reject my life. I don’t want to choose death—I want to live. I just want to live my life with you.”
I took both her hands, and I looked in her eyes. “You can’t possibly know how much I want to live my life with you. For now you have to try to live as fully and happily as you can. You’ll become a nurse. Maybe a doctor. You’ll fall in love.”
“I’ve fallen in love,” she said, and her eyes spilled over.
I kissed her hands. “You’ll fall in love again. And maybe you’ll have children and you’ll grow old and die when it’s time. And maybe you’ll look back and remember me every so often. And when you come back again, I will be waiting for you. I will find you.”
She was shaking her head. “But how? You say that, but how will you find me?”
“I just will. I always do.”
“But I won’t even know you, will I? I’ll treat you like a stranger. My memory is only average. I’m not even as good as Nestor the dog.” She started to cry, and I held her as close as I could.
“You don’t need to know me. I’ll know you.”
I felt her wet sobs against my chest. “I won’t know me,” she said.
HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2007
IT TURNED OUT it was difficult to locate a young man named Daniel Grey (spelled both Grey and Gray the two times he was listed in the high school yearbook) about whom you thought incessantly but had no information. Lucy tried all the normal Internet searches and found a dizzying number of Daniel Grey/Grays. The only narrowing factor was his age—she didn’t know his exact birthday—and that didn’t help much. The school had no forwarding address and no record of him, but on the bright side, the morgue had no record of him, either.
She’d pressed Claude, the desk guard from Whyburn House, as hard as she’d dared for information about the mystery man who’d come looking for her, but Claude’s initial certainty seemed to disintegrate under questioning. He wasn’t truly sure his name was Daniel; it might have been Greg. He wasn’t sure if his eyes were green. They might have been brown. “I’d know him if I saw him,” he said apologetically.
It turned out, though, that it was easier to locate a young woman without a name who was long dead, based on a psychic, a hypnotist, and the contents of her mind, than a person she had actually known and kissed in high school. Hythe was an actual town in England, and of the handful of manor houses in its vicinity, only one had been used as a hospital during the war. She’d thought at first it was the Second World War, but the family who owned it had not been living there in the years leading up to it. It seemed that much more remote to extend her search back to the First War, but that’s what she did.
And that’s how she came upon the Honorable Constance Rowe. There was also a Lucinda Rowe, her older sister by four years, but as soon as Lucy saw the name Constance, she knew. Madame Esme had said the name, she was almost certain. Constance was the younger mistress of Hastonbury Hall, daughter of the lord, granddaughter of a viscount. The house was used as a hospital in both wars.
The English obviously loved their great houses, because there was a lot of information to be found on them, including the fact that Hastonbury was extant, though largely uninhabited this century. Lucy spent hours sitting in front of her computer looking at pictures of the house. She stared at the front gate, and she closed her eyes and she knew how the road curved beyond the reach of the photo. It was eerie how she knew the shadow cast by a giant stand of trees to the left and the way the meadow sloped down to the river on the right. How did she know? Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she was wrong about them. Maybe it was just her imagination.
She felt as though she were living in The Matrix. She’d loved the movie. She and Marnie had watched it five times, but that didn’t mean she wanted it to be real.
Every new picture she saw offered unnerving corroboration. She recognized the contours of the library from the arched mullioned windows along the façade, and then she found a picture of the interior to show it. She could point to the dining hall, the music room, the kitchen, from the pictures of the outside of the house. And then she d
iscovered a floor plan with all of them marked, just as she remembered. She could clearly picture the way the staircase rose from the center hall. Eerie as it all was, it was kind of a fantasy to imagine herself belonging to such a world.
Lucy wondered what her father would say to this. He took pride in being a Southerner for seven generations. Forget the reincarnation, the psychic, the hypnotist, and all of that. What would he think of her having been a Brit so recently? It was probably worse than being a Yankee.
The more Lucy discovered about the short, tragic life of Constance Rowe, the less of a fantasy it seemed. In fact, as the days passed, she began to mourn her. Her mother, famous for her gardens and her reckless nature, had died in an automobile accident when Constance was a child (they’d had one of the earliest cars, and her mother had a passion for driving it) and her older brother had died in the war. She had fallen in love with a soldier in her care (for that part Lucy had not yet found corroboration) who died of war wounds and broke her heart. She became a nurse and traveled with a delegation of medics and missionaries to what was then the Belgian Congo. She died of malaria near Leopoldville at the age of twenty-three.
Lucy, manning her blender by day, found herself living inside a strange sorrow. She didn’t mourn for herself—it didn’t feel like that exactly—but the sadness of Constance covered her like a shroud.
Now her thoughts started to stray in yet another direction. She was sick to her very bones of blending smoothies. She felt as though she would cry if she had to cut one more blade of wheatgrass, but she needed to take on more hours. She needed enough to pay for a plane ticket and a cheap hotel and a rental car, and the pound wasn’t in her favor. She needed to make enough money to get herself to England before the summer was over.
Constance was a real person. The house was a real place. Perhaps the letters she’d talked about were also real and waiting for Lucy to find them. Perhaps all the information she needed to find them was in her head.
There was a satisfaction in being right and a terror in finding so much evidence that the world didn’t work the way you or most other people thought it did.
HASTONBURY HALL, ENGLAND, 1919
THE OLD ROOM, her yellow room, now had three new occupants. Their wounds were serious, and their spirits were low and they needed her attention. They didn’t call her Sophia. They didn’t speak or read Aramaic. They didn’t tell her stories of riding her across the desert on horseback. Constance tried to take care of them anyway.
Daniel’s body and his few things, including the shirt she’d given him, had been transported to his parents and sisters near Nottingham. He hadn’t wanted to contact them before; she wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because he’d known what was going to happen all along.
Constance had sat on the dusty back steps and watched the men load the truck. Daniel wasn’t the only one. The little farm outside Nottingham wasn’t their only stop. She’d watched them close the back and drive away. She watched it get small and watched the dust rise and then settle. She remembered when this car park was a kitchen garden and she grew cucumbers and tomatoes and lettuces and pumpkins.
He’d left her a letter. She couldn’t read it for several days. She’d hidden it in her old hiding place, a compartment built into the wall behind the bookshelf in her yellow room. She felt guilty wishing that the sick, groaning men who were not Daniel would please get out of her room and leave her with her letter and her thoughts.
She tried not to be distracted, but she was. She tried to remember the names and the stories of these young men as though she cared, and she did care, but she couldn’t make her mind stay with them. She thought of Daniel, and most obsessively and fearfully, she thought of her future self, who would forget him. I don’t want to forget him. How can I make myself remember?
“Can you improve an average memory?” she’d asked him tearfully, two days before he died.
“If you want to badly enough,” he’d said, “I think you can.”
Well, she wanted to badly enough. If wanting was what it took, then she would succeed. But how did you do it? How did you shout to yourself across the years? How did you inscribe a message in your soul, deep enough so it would be sure to travel with you through death and loud enough to be sure to get heard? She wasn’t asking to remember entire lives; she just wanted to hold on to this one thing.
I will leave myself clues. I will send myself dreams. I will make myself remember.
She thought of death more than life, and that was wrong in a place like this. Daniel had gone there without her. What was happening to him? Was he frightened? What if he didn’t come back this time?
What if he finally stopped remembering? What if this was the death that would make him forget? Maybe in the next life they would pass each other on a sidewalk in Madrid or Dublin or New York City. Maybe they would stop and look at each other and feel some odd yearning, but neither of them would know why. They would want to stop, but they would be embarrassed, and neither would know what to say. They would go their separate ways. Who knew? Maybe that happened every day to people who’d once loved each other. It seemed inexpressibly bleak to have a tragedy you couldn’t even recognize.
The idea of writing her own letter occurred to her in a morning dream. It was the kind of dream that was so vivid you kept thinking you were actually doing it. Like when you were cold and kept thinking you were getting another blanket. Or you had to urinate and you kept thinking maybe you’d gotten up to go, but you hadn’t.
The letter was half written by the time she opened her eyes. She grabbed paper and pen and wrote without thinking, as though taking dictation. It felt promising, somehow, to have this conduit to her dream-self. Daniel once said that dreams were filled with images and feelings from old lives, and because he remembered the source material, he found his dreams less mysterious than most. Maybe this was a dream she could hold on to.
I don’t know who you are, but I pray this letter will have gotten into the right hands. I pray that you will not scorn it for the strange notions it contains and will understand the ardent sincerity with which I have written it. I am Constance Rowe of Hastonbury Hall in Kent, near the village of Hythe. I am two weeks short of my nineteenth birthday. I was once called Sophia, and many other names, too. If this letter has reached its intended reader, then I am you, I believe, your past, an older incarnation of your soul. I know that sounds ridiculous and impossible to believe. I felt the same way. But please try to believe it.
Daniel told me some of the ways this works, living and dying and living again, but I don’t understand it at all well. I know there are things about you/me that seem to survive every death. I would suspect that you have a birthmark on your upper-left arm. You probably have problems with your throat. You dream about the desert, and your nightmares are almost always about fire. Maybe you even dream about me and this house. I am hoping that you do.
I encountered Daniel here in the big house. During the war it’s been turned into a hospital, though it belongs to my family. He was wounded at the Somme—the second, not the first—and I am a nurse’s aide, and I cared for him. He died eleven days ago. I wanted to die with him.
Daniel knew me/you before, over many lives. He remembers everything. I don’t know how he’ll be when you see him, where he’ll be from or what he’ll look like, but he will be called Daniel. He will remember you if he finds you, and God, how I hope he will. He will want to call you Sophia and tell you extraordinary stories. You will be irritated, confused, perhaps even frightened at first. Get him to prove himself to you if you must. He’s not much for showing off, but he can speak and read an impossible number of languages, and he knows how to work every kind of ancient instrument, whether musical or scientific. His mind is better than a full encyclopedia. He will know things about you: what you dream and how you think, and it will haunt you.
Please believe him. Keep your heart open to him. He can make you happy. He has always loved you, and you once loved him with all your heart.
C
onstance
HYTHE, ENGLAND, 2007
LUCY RENTED A car at Heathrow and drove to Hythe, a quaint town with a long, pebbly gray beach on the Channel. There was so much salt and mist in the air that everything felt damp, even her clothes as she lifted them out of her suitcase. She had gotten a tiny room over a restaurant on the High Street. She’d thought it was going to be a pub, but it turned out to be a curry shop. Within a short while she was not only damp but smelled distinctly of curry.
In spite of the immense effort and expense to get herself across the Atlantic, and the weird lies she told her poor gullible parents about her dear friend Constance, the English exchange student, who was dying for Lucy to visit, Lucy was still reluctant to make the fifteen-minute drive to Hastonbury. She had the directions. She’d downloaded them and printed them out at home. All of the planning and the strategizing had been one thing, but now that it was time to face the real version of the house she’d been imagining for two and a half months, she was apprehensive. It felt to her as though every fear, every fantasy, every bad dream she’d ever had, would, from this time forward, have the potential to be real. Going to Hastonbury Hall felt like making a deal to live in a different kind of a world, and she didn’t know if she could agree to her part of it. If she got really scared, she wanted to be able to put everything back in its place and go home. This, she suspected, was her Rubicon.
She had a cup of Earl Grey and two pieces of cake at a tea shop. She bought Marnie and her mother pairs of socks with ten separate compartments for the toes and the head of a different queen on each of them.
What am I doing here? she asked herself, trudging along the High Street. I am getting fat and buying dumb novelty socks. She seriously considered packing up her suitcase and checking out of her curry shop and just going home. She could go back to school and her regular life. She could go to parties and talk with real, living people. She could be pre-professional. She could leave this strange ghost life she had entered at any time. She could banish Daniel and Constance and Madame Esme from her thoughts.