Sophia’s old eyes were watching me, and I hid my face from her. She didn’t even know all we’d lost. “He was waiting for you, too,” I said. I had disappointed her.
“I was always foolish,” she said.
I stayed there as long as I could, my thoughts churning. I stayed until they kicked me out, sometime after ten that night.
I came back the next morning, and I told her about the old things. I held her hand for hours, and I told her about our ride through the desert. I told her about the Great War and her being a lady of Hastonbury Hall and how it had been turned into a hospital and she had taken care of me there. I called her Sophia and told her I loved her. I always had. She was asleep by then, but I needed her to know. I was scared I would lose her for good this time.
BY THE END of the third visit, I knew what I was going to do.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “I’m coming, too. We’ll come back together.” That’s what she’d wanted to do before, when she was Constance, but I’d said no. This time we’d do it. This time it was her life that was spent and mine that was young and promising. I was the one who could see to the other side. That made it easier.
“This is going to be our chance,” I said to her.
I was sorry to give up such a life. I was especially sorry for it because of my mother, Molly. She would lose her father and her son in one short stretch, and I knew—or at least I would have known if I let myself think about it—that it would be devastating to her. But I had a strategy for weathering the losses, and it didn’t involve a lot of thinking.
I wished I could tell Molly that it was what I wanted, and that I would come back soon. I wished I could make her know it was all right. But another voice inside my head had a different idea. She loves you, it said. She doesn’t want to lose you, and it’s not all right.
I knew in my heart it was so, but I managed to ignore it. I was young and stupid, and in a big hurry to get to Sophia again. How else could I have done it? It’s amazing the things we take for granted.
There was a big part of me that resisted Molly’s love. I even had the effrontery to think I succeeded in it. It was hard enough to cling to one person from life to life. It was hard enough to have one person you loved forget you every time. Maybe Ben was capable of holding on to the love of an infinite number of people, but I could barely hold on to one.
I went to an infamous corner in D.C. on a winter night before my eighteenth birthday. I don’t think of that night very often, but I confess I do think about what happened the night before. It was the first time in a very long time I thought enough about a mother’s feelings to try to say good-bye to her. I won’t attempt to describe the things she said or the way I felt. As Whitman wrote, they scorn the best I can do to relate them.
I’m not very good at living meaningful lives, but I try to make my deaths meaningful, when I can. I try to use them to benefit some person or cause in some small way, but that time I was too young and in too much of a hurry to think of a way to do it—other than scaring the shit out of a few drug addicts.
I went to this place near D Street, I think it was, near the 9:30 Club, where I used to go to hear music sometimes. I found my way to a room off an alley where the addicts went. Not the happy pot smokers but the serious users. I brought enough cash to make an impression. I found my druggie Virgil, a desperate woman in her thirties with an arm that told the tale. I promised I’d buy for her if she found me the best, strongest stuff. She had the idea it was habitual with me, and I didn’t correct her. It was her needle, her excitement, her fingers tying the band around my arm.
That was the only time I ever took heroin, and it will be my last. I guess dying of it is no way to start. Maybe I angered fate by doing it. It wasn’t suicide, but it was about the closest I’ve gotten. It was cheating, a way to avoid it on a technicality. I’d hoped my sheer fervency to reunite with Sophia would get me back fast, and thankfully it did. It wasn’t death I wanted. That much was clear to me in my dying moment. I wanted life very badly.
But when nature offers you one of her true gifts, there’s a special punishment for those who throw it away. I did come back again, but if you believe in these things, it probably explains the mother I was dealt in my subsequent life.
TYSONS CORNER MALL, VIRGINIA, 2001
The next mother I was born to was an addict. I was apparently an addict myself as a newborn. It seemed fitting. She was probably a newer version of some desperate character I had known in an earlier life, but I was too young to place her by the time she took off, which was when I was about three. I was found alone in the apartment by a neighbor. I think I’d been on my own for a couple of days, and I remember being very scared. When you are three it’s harder to see the big picture.
I was held by the state for about a month before I was put into foster care. I remember meeting with the social worker the day before my placement. “So when am I going to meet my mom?” I remember asking.
I was put with a foster family near Shepherdstown, West Virginia. They had two regular kids and two other foster kids. They watched a lot of TV in that house. Both parents smoked constantly. I can’t separate those days from the smell and the smolder of two lit cigarettes, and it gives me a sick feeling when I think of it.
I don’t remember a dinner when we sat around the table. I don’t remember a meal without the TV on. One of the foster kids, Trevor, was violent and prone to running away, so I was left mostly alone unless I got in the way during one of the severe storms, which I did a few times and paid a steep price for it.
It was strange living two such different childhoods back-to-back like that. My love for my old family and the pain of missing them was bound up close, and that was almost harder to take than the new people. With the new people at least, I didn’t have to love anybody or be obligated to them. They weren’t kind enough to require anything from me, and their unkindness I tried to leave unanswered. I was free of affection, living in my own world and doing things myself. I don’t think I caused anybody too much trouble. I remember getting a look at my file later, during one of my periodic meetings with the social worker when I was about fifteen. “Attachment disorder” it said in big, sharp print at the top.
Sometimes I used to lie in bed at night and listen to some sports event on the radio pretty loud, though I could still hear the parents fight. I would think about Molly and my old family from before and wonder what they were doing at that moment. Sometimes when I missed them worst I thought, What have I done? But then when I got a little older and I didn’t need a mother quite as badly, I started to think about Sophia again. It was the thought of her that kept me moving forward.
I was awkward in that body because it grew faster and bigger than my other bodies. I was not fast or especially coordinated, as I had been in my previous body, but I was strong, at least. The foster dad was no more than five and a half feet tall, and my size didn’t make him like me any more.
I spent my time carving animals out of wood and reading books at the library and thinking about how I was going to find Sophia. I kept most of the animals hidden, but the foster mother once saw me putting the finishing touches on a goose. She looked it over carefully. “I’d say that’s good enough to put in a museum,” she told me, not like that was necessarily a good thing.
We went to a pretty dismal public school, but I had a few good teachers. I was obviously a capable student, so some good-hearted educator got it into his head that I was “gifted.” They had me sit in a classroom by myself while everyone else was at recess and take one of those standardized tests where you fill in the bubbles with a pencil. I remember leaving every other question blank.
I had learned long ago that it was a dicey prospect to stand out very far. There was that one disastrous time in the early forties when my parents had my IQ tested. That was lesson enough. Needless to say, you’ve got to have a large and unusual mental capacity to remember a thousand years of largely insignificant history.
As soon as I got old e
nough I started to look for Sophia. I had some information to work with this time. I knew she must have died in late 1985 or early 1986, and I had seen her and talked to her in hospice close enough to her death to feel hopeful I had left a few influential ideas in her mind. I felt confident, almost by intuition, that she would come back somewhere nearby. She’d done it once before; I prayed she’d do it again.
My great stroke of luck came one afternoon at a mall in Tysons Corner when I was fifteen. I saw the girl, now called Marnie, at one of those nearly extinct photo booths just inside the entrance. It took me a couple of minutes to place her. Of course I didn’t know her as Marnie at the time. I recognized her from the church in Fairfax in the early nineteen seventies. Her peaked eyebrows were what helped me out. She had the kind of eyes that gave you shit and wanted to trust you at the same time. She had been the old woman sitting with Sophia, Sophia’s mother. She must have lived as long as her daughter. They had been close, I could see, and something about their way of relating gave me a strong conviction that they would come back close together.
You shouldn’t try to control these things, I remembered Ben saying, as I followed Marnie from Tysons Corner. I followed her to the lobby of a building with a lot of doctors’ and dentists’ offices, where she met up with her mother and went down into a parking garage. I saw them get into a car together and drive off. I got the license plate number, and that’s how I found my way to Hopewood, Virginia.
The first time I saw Sophia in her newest form was the following Saturday. That was a day worth remembering. I was nervous on the bus ride down there. You never know what you are going to find or if you’ll find anyone at all. I went to Marnie’s address in the morning and walked nervously up and down the block, not sure what my next move should be. And then I saw her. She was walking along the sidewalk toward me. It was pretty stunning. I can’t really describe the way I felt. It was a lush spring day, and the sun was washing off her loose, light-colored hair as she bounced along the pretty sidewalk. She was wearing cutoff shorts and flip-flops and a green T-shirt. She was so young and so fresh-looking, after last seeing her old and dying in hospice. Her legs were long and strong and suntanned and skinny like a girl’s.
That’s a memory from my present life, just like anybody could have, but it’s already been cataloged among my very best. When I think of it, I see her walking toward me in slow motion with a soundtrack in the background. The song I always think of is “Here Comes the Sun.”
I saw such familiar things about her. The way she tilted her head when she laughed. Her wiry, capable hands. The crook of her elbows, the top of her ear poking through her long hair. She had a dark little freckle to the side of her chin.
I remember the feeling so well. This is the beginning of something big. This is our time.
I was kind of shattered in her presence, I realized. As happy as I was to see her, I was scared to talk to her for fear of beginning wrong. I was a stranger again. She’d be harder to approach, more suspicious this time, if anything. She was too pretty to presume upon. The life I was living was almost completely without love, and I was cut off and out of practice. I felt uncertain about being able to make her love me again.
But my hopefulness was the biggest thing. She was young, and so was I. I knew what she looked like; I knew where she lived. She was back on my grid, and she wasn’t married to my brother or anyone else. This was the life we could finally, I hoped, spend together if I could just handle it right.
Sophia turned up Marnie’s walk as I stood there stupidly. Marnie opened the front door, and I overheard Marnie’s voice. “Hey, who’s the guy?”
“What guy?”
“Across the street.”
By the time she snuck a look back, I had turned and begun to walk the other way.
“I have no idea,” Sophia said.
“Too bad,” Marnie said. “He was very cute.”
My heart soared to have any little thing. I was lucky to be cute, because I think I was pretty ugly in my last couple of lives.
But I knew I would have to be careful. This was the life for which I had sacrificed everything, and I didn’t want to blow it. I was so used to getting a clean slate from life to life, a kind of do-over for any major mistakes I made. But inside of this life Sophia’s memory would be just as good as mine. There were no do-overs. The whole thing felt fragile to me, and I was full of self-doubt. I didn’t want her to think I was a madman or a stalker. Looking back, I wish I’d taken my own advice more to heart.
I visited her two more times in Hopewood over the next two years without getting up the courage to say a word to her. Once I saw her planting black-eyed Susans in her front lawn. Once I saw her and her sister, Dana, in a coffee shop on Coe Street. I remember being struck by the look of her and her sister together, Lucy’s sweet eagerness contrasted with Dana’s native jumpiness. Dana was familiar to me, probably from an old life but also because she had the ragged look of a deeply agitated soul. I recognized her as the kind that took her agitation from one life to the next, wreaking havoc as she went. I’m sure she tortured the people who loved her, made them worry about where they’d gone wrong, when probably they couldn’t have made any difference one way or the other.
I waited until I was seventeen to make my move. I didn’t want to cause any big trouble in leaving Shepherdstown. I wasn’t worried about the foster family missing me so much as I was worried about causing headaches for my caseworker. I moved to Hopewood, rented myself a tiny apartment over an Indian restaurant, and entered Hopewood High School in Sophia’s class.
HOPEWOOD, VIRGINIA, 2008
THE DAY AFTER her graduation from college, Lucy took a bus back to Hopewood carrying two bags, a scraggly philodendron, and Sawmill in his stupid glass terrarium. She’d shipped the rest of her stuff in cardboard boxes. She arrived home with no clear plans for her future beyond blending dreaded smoothies or selling underwear at Victoria’s Secret. But then something strange happened. For twelve nights in a row she dreamed of a garden.
The first night she knew it wasn’t a garden she had been in, but it was familiar even so, and naturalistic in a way that wasn’t like a dream at all. The second night she was there again. She recognized exactly the things she’d seen the night before: the fountain, the little stone wall, the magnificent stands of peonies in pink and fuchsia and white. Most of all she recognized the scent. She wasn’t sure she had smelled anything in a dream before, but this smell got into every part of her.
The next night she was joyful to find herself back in the same garden a third time. It was the same place in all its particular beauties, but this time she decided to investigate further. She went through a rustic pergola blazing with red clematis and found a low-walled garden surrounded by blooming pink dogwoods and populated by about a million butterflies beating their wings in slow motion amid daisies, snapdragons, zinnias, and cosmos. The butterflies came in every color, pattern, and size, and stood perched in their strange, stuttering suspension. And then all at once they took flight. They whirled around over her head, and she felt panic at the thought that she had scared them away. But then the flying spiral thickened and slowed until it was all around her and she was the center. She blinked her dream eyes, and all the butterflies went back to their slow-beating perches on the flowers.
The fourth night she investigated even further. By the fifth night she was so excited to begin dreaming that she went to bed at nine o’clock. It was still a little light out. She hadn’t gone to bed so early since she’d gotten her tonsils out in sixth grade.
She was happy in the garden, happier than she could remember being since she was very young, long before the troubles started with Dana. She felt a kind of wonder there, which brought to her sleeping mind a deep, mysterious, inexplicable aspect of how it felt to be a child. Each night she lay in her bed waiting to fall asleep, scared she wouldn’t go back to the garden, begging her waking self to please go back, and each night she went back. She wished she could swap her days for he
r nights, her reality for her dreams. Were you allowed to change from one side to the other?
She’d never slept so much in her life. Yet still she yawned through her days at the health-food store and yawned her way through dinner, longing to get back to bed and her garden.
The sixth night she dreamed she crossed a miniature bridge over a narrow stream and explored a new part of the garden. Most of the plants were unfamiliar, coarser and spinier, and the smells were different. It wasn’t beautiful in the same way, but the air felt magical to her. Some of the plants were so distinctive she studied them for a long time, and as soon as she woke up, she got out a notebook and sketched them before the memory could fade. The next night she left her sketchbook and a set of colored pencils next to her bed, and when she fell asleep and went back to that part of the garden she studied more of them, seeming to know in her dream that she would be sketching them later. She recorded them as well as she could—smelling them and feeling the texture of their leaves. The next morning she woke early and spent the two hours before work on her drawings.
When she got home from work that evening, she took out her beloved American Horticultural Society Encyclopedia of Plants and Flowers and, with a thudding heart, tried to find real plants to match her drawings. It took a while, but she found some unmistakable matches. She discovered all of them came from one section of the book: the medicinal herbs. Feverfew, chickweed, goat’s rue, blue cohosh, everlasting. This new part was a medicine garden.
It wasn’t until the eighth night that she saw another person in the garden, over by the butterflies. At first she thought it was Dana, and she felt joyful, but she quickly saw that it didn’t look like Dana and it clearly wasn’t Dana. It was a woman in her twenties, it appeared, who had light gray eyes and freckles and shiny dark hair.