Daniel felt Sophia squeezing his hand. The sounds passed and faded.
“He said he was you. I knew he wasn’t you. Why did he tell me that? What does he want from me?”
“It’s a very long story,” he whispered. “And possibly hard to believe. But I’ll tell you if you want me to.”
“Right here? In this closet?”
“No. I think the best thing is to wait here for a few more minutes and then go down through the kitchen and out that door. I’m parked in the alley. There’s a place we can go to up the coast until I can arrange a flight out of here.”
She nodded, both eager and bewildered, staring at him up and down as well as she could in the darkness. “You still have those shoes,” she whispered.
He looked down at them and back at her questioningly.
“Those shoes. From high school. I remember them.”
“Do you?” He felt absurdly happy about it.
He waited until all was quiet before he felt through the hangers in the back of the tiny room and handed her a dress-length, zippered smock like those the housekeeping staff wore. “You might be less noticeable in this,” he said. He found a head scarf that went with it. “Keep your head down, okay? We shouldn’t walk together. You go first, and I’ll follow. But don’t worry about me, just keep going. Go down the stairs to the right and then into the kitchen. Walk straight through to the metal door under the exit sign, which will take you outside. The car is a red Ford Focus with Mexican plates parked directly across the alley, and it will be open when you get there. Don’t stop, and don’t talk to anybody if you can help it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” He wanted to hold her. He wanted to touch her in some way. It was hard to keep his hands off her, but it was impossible to put them on her, too. What did she think of him now?
“Is he dangerous?”
“Yes,” he answered. “But I won’t take my eyes off of you.”
She held up the smock.
He smiled in spite of himself. “Except for right now. While you change. I’ll turn around.”
She smiled, too, and he didn’t want to turn around, but he did. He heard her fiddling with the smock.
“Done,” she said.
He turned back around and the robe was on the ground and the smock was zipped up the front. She was packing her hair into the scarf. He put his hands in his pockets.
“What about shoes?”
“Right.” There were shallow cubbies along the wall, in which he found a pair of pink foam flip-flops. He held them up to her.
“I think they’ll work.” She put them on.
He found a shelf of white linens and handed her a tall pile. “Here.”
She took it.
He moved to the door and put his hand on the knob. He listened for a moment. “You ready?”
“Yes.”
He opened the door. “Go. Keep your head down.”
She went out into the hall. She took a moment to turn around and smile at him, and his heart melted some more. She made a beautiful housekeeper.
NOBODY TOOK NOTICE of either of them until they were in the car. A man in a bellman’s uniform opened the kitchen door and started shouting at them, but Daniel was already steering out of the alley.
“He’s taking down the plates,” Daniel said to her, looking in his rearview mirror.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“We’ll figure something out.”
She kicked off her flip-flops and put her bare feet on the dashboard. “This is fun.” She should have been scared, and she was, but it was hard to give the real world much notice when he was this close.
“If we get out of here it will be.”
Daniel concentrated for a few moments on finding the road to take them northward. He kept glancing in the rearview mirror, and she guessed he was checking that they weren’t being followed.
“Does he have a car?” he asked.
“Not that I know of. We didn’t rent one. We took a cab from the airport.”
“Good. That might slow him down a little.”
“Are you sure he’s going to come?”
“No. But I think he’s going to catch up with us eventually. He’s not going to give up now. We just have to hope it takes him a while.”
She took off her scarf and studied the side of his face. It felt good to be with him, no matter what.
“Is this a good time for the story, do you think?” she asked.
He nodded, but his look was cautious, and she understood why. “It’s long and strange, and you don’t need to believe any of it if you don’t want to,” he said. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll tell you my version, and after that we can try to think of an explanation that actually makes sense.”
His voice was light, but she felt deep compassion for him. He’d been alone with his version of the world for a long time. She wanted him to know she understood that. She had that and so much else to tell him, but she couldn’t seem to get any of it out. Her ideas spun wildly in her head, and she couldn’t slow them down or put them in a logical order. “It’s okay, Daniel,” she managed to say. “I understand more than you think I do.”
He glanced from the road to her face and back. He was quiet for a few seconds. “What do you mean?”
She tried to calm her thoughts. She took a few slow breaths. “I mean I—I don’t understand it exactly, but I believe—I think I believe the idea that we—our souls—live on in some way so that you can know people and remember things through more than one life.”
He looked from her to the road and back several times. It was harder to have this conversation when they couldn’t look at each other. She longed to connect with him in some way—not to grab him and kiss him, although she didn’t want to rule that out, but to understand how he felt about her, to read his awkwardness better, to begin to break down five numbing years of uncertainty.
“What made you . . . think this?” he asked carefully.
“Well. A psychic, a hypnotist, and a few other things I don’t believe in. That’s another long story.”
His posture was still. Both hands gripped the steering wheel.
“Do you know about me?” He looked as though he was scared to trust her.
“I only know a little bit. I know I’ve known you before. At least I think so.” She plucked at her seat belt. “Can I ask you something I don’t understand?”
“Sure.”
“How come you are always Daniel, while the rest of us keep coming back as different people? Have you been alive for a very long time?”
She saw relief on his face. “Is that what you thought? That I was hundreds of years old?” He looked at her and smiled. “I think you’ve relaxed your standards for what’s acceptable in a companion.”
She laughed. “It’s been a strange few years.”
He let his breath out. He sat back in his seat. “I’m twenty-four years old. In a way I have been alive for a very long time, but I’ve died a lot of times, too, just like you.”
“Then how do you stay the same from one life to the next?”
“I don’t. It’s my mind that stays the same. Because I remember.”
She nodded.
“It’s the only unusual thing about me. But it’s very unusual.”
“Huh.” She took a moment with that. “And you remember everything? All of your lives? All the people you’ve known?”
He kept glancing at her, as though he wanted to be able to tell how this was going down. “My memory isn’t perfect, but yes, I remember almost all of it. Except my birthday. I tend to forget that.”
She heard the lightness in his voice, and she felt it, too. “You do not.”
“I do. It seems like half the days of the year are my birthday. They sort of lose their punch.”
“I can see that.”
“And it undermines my belief in astrology.”
“That’s sad.”
“Sad and happy.” He looked happy right now.
“So . . . happy birthday.”
“Hey, thanks.” He fiddled with the radio and turned on some salsa. They were both smiling stupidly.
She drummed her fingers against her knee. “Is there anybody else like you?”
“A handful of people.”
“Do you all know each other? Is it like a club?”
He laughed. “No. Not quite. No T-shirts or secret handshakes. But I know two of them and have met or heard of a few others.”
“Like who?”
Daniel glanced at the rearview mirror. “Like the man who will soon be following us.”
“I’VE KIDNAPPED YOU before, you know,” Daniel told her as the sun tipped its pink rays into the car window and gave them both a kind of glow.
“Really?” she said. “And here I thought it was my first time.”
He laughed. He was strangely relaxed, almost drunk on a cocktail of excitement, relief, and fear. The relief was because she knew about him, believed him, didn’t run away from him or regard him with apprehension. It was remarkable, really, how she had worked these things out. What did it mean? What did he mean to her? And then the darker thoughts nagged to be let in. How could she have thought that Joaquim was him? How could she have come all the way to Mexico with Joaquim?
“So when was that?” she asked.
“A long time ago.”
“What was my name?”
He looked at her in surprise. “It was Sophia.”
“Sophia? That’s the name you called me in high school.”
“It was the first name of yours I knew. Last time we made our getaway on a beautiful Arabian, which was more romantic than the Ford Focus.”
“I’m good with the Ford Focus,” she said, and he laughed.
No matter how she’d ended up in this place, there was surprising sweetness in getting away from Joaquim, in being joined with her in a common cause and feeling that he could protect her. It was the one inadvertent good turn Joaquim had ever done him, or probably anyone.
She tucked her feet under her and looked at him more seriously. “Why did you kidnap me that time?”
“For the same reason and from the same man. I was trying to help you.”
“Did I need helping?”
“Yes. Though by no fault of your own.”
“What does he want from me?”
Daniel veered onto the road toward Los Cuches and got up to speed. “Now or then?”
“Let’s start with then.”
He nodded. “I’ll start at the beginning, if you want me to.”
“I want you to.”
“Not the very beginning but the beginning of you and me and the man you came here with. His name used to be Joaquim, and I don’t know what it is now. We know it’s not Daniel, so I’ll call him Joaquim. I’m kind of attached to the old names, as you probably noticed.”
She nodded.
“It starts more than twelve hundred years ago in what is now called Turkey.”
JOLUTA, MEXICO, 2009
THEY LEFT THE car in the parking lot of a brightly lit supermarket a few miles inland from the coast road. Daniel paid a young man a wad of pesos to drive them another half-hour to the ocean. He’d arranged for them to stay at a bungalow on a remote part of the beach, he’d explained to her, on an undeveloped bay between two rocky headlands.
The sun sat quietly over the water when they pulled in, as if it were waiting for them. Daniel thanked the driver and took down his cell phone number. “I might need to call you on short notice,” he explained in his odd Spanish. He’d overpaid so dramatically, he seemed to know the young man would do what he could.
“Anytime,” the man said.
Daniel found the key under the flowerpot, as he’d arranged with the rental office.
“How did you plan all this?” she asked. “How did you know what would happen?”
“I didn’t. I hoped we’d get this far. I wanted to make sure we had a place to go if we did. I’m going to charter a plane out of Colima, probably, but we won’t get out until tomorrow morning.”
It was a whitewashed stucco house with a tile roof under a crown of deep orange bougainvillea. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. She felt the ocean air that filled the house. It had a big, highceilinged central room open to a terrace and the beach just beyond, with two fans spinning overhead. The kitchen was at the back, open to the big room. On either side was a bedroom, both of them simple and pretty.
As they wandered around the little house they kept looking at each other, and she wondered if his sense of disbelief could possibly match hers. What was the category of this adventure? Was he just looking out for her? Would he deposit her safely back home and go back to his life, and that was all it was? A part of her mind kept returning anxiously to the story he’d told her in the car about him and Sophia. He’d left her in a remote village and gone off and gotten killed.
A low wall surrounded the terrace, and without really conferring, they walked over to it and sat down on it side by side to watch the last of the sun. She was still wearing her ridiculous peach-colored housekeeping smock. He was still dressed for the Washington winter. They were both quiet.
She felt her thigh touching his. She couldn’t help being aware that she was not wearing anything under her smock. She’d gone running out of the hotel room in a bathrobe. She had nothing to change into and no ability to think even a few minutes ahead.
Numbly, she stared at the floating dock about fifty yards out. She thought it would be fun to swim to it. That’s the kind of thing they would do if they were on vacation together, she thought wistfully. But they weren’t. She kept wanting to think it, but it wasn’t so. This was a mercy mission to get her away from an old enemy. Daniel was just trying to help her. Maybe he just took pity on her. Maybe it was for old time’s sake. I hope that’s not all it is, she thought.
No matter how it felt to be near him, she had to keep her swollen heart in check. He could have found her long before this if he’d wanted to. She thought of all those years of yearning for him. Why, if he had wanted her anything like the way she had wanted him, hadn’t he come for her sooner?
When the sun dunked under the Pacific Ocean he went to the refrigerator and looked inside. “Can I get you something to drink?” he called to her.
“Thanks. Anything,” she said. “No bourbon.”
DANIEL HAD SOMETHING he needed to say, but he didn’t manage to get it out until two ginger ales, a ripe mango, two sandwiches, and a bag of chips later.
“How did he manage to get close to you?” he finally asked her, as though it was the next logical line in a long and somewhat frustrating conversation.
“You mean Joaquim.”
“I really didn’t think he would be able to get close, because of what he did to you when you were his wife. I know it was a long time ago, but usually those feelings stay pretty strong. I thought you’d want to run in the other direction. But I guess I was wrong. Maybe the feelings do fade after a while. Or maybe I just don’t understand the whole picture.”
She put her glass down. She felt his frustration, and she sent some right back. “I did want to run in the other direction, Daniel. And I would have. I struggled to make myself sit next to him. I don’t know how I did it. I felt like gagging when he kissed me. I felt guilty about that at the time, but now when I think of it I not only feel stupid, I want to gag some more.”
“Did you . . . ?” Daniel had a pressing question, and he couldn’t get it out. She knew what it was, and she didn’t feel like helping him.
“Did I what?”
“Did you . . . spend a lot of time kissing him?”
“Not much. No.”
He was embarrassed but stubborn. “Did it go further than kissing him?”
“Is that any of your business?”
“No.”
“Daniel.” She stood up. She felt like shaking him. “I didn’t have sex with him. I wouldn’t let him touch me. I couldn’t stand it. Last night I slept in a chair. Is
that what you were trying to ask?”
He nodded, with a look of chagrin. “But why did you go anywhere with him if that’s the way you felt?”
“You know why. Because he told me he was you.”
He shook his head. He was quiet for a moment. “And that seemed to you like a good thing?”
Her eyes were suddenly full. “How can you ask me that?”
He got up the courage to put a finger on her finger, a thumb against her wrist. “The last time I saw you at that party at the end of high school you ran away from me. I understand why. It was my fault, I know. But the last thing you did was to push me away from you. I’ve been trying to stay away, because that’s what you wanted. I didn’t want to cause you more distress. And I didn’t know how to try again and make it right. I didn’t want to ruin what little chance I might someday have with you.”
She wiped at her eye before any tears could get going. “Everything changed since then. I was scared of the things you said, but I was more scared of the way I felt. I started having these . . . visions out of nowhere, and I thought I was going crazy. I kept thinking about them and about the things you said. I wanted to find you, but I thought you were dead. Somebody saw you jump into the Appomattox River.”
He nodded morosely. “I jumped, but I didn’t die.”
“So I gather. But I didn’t know that then. I looked everywhere for you. You have no idea how much I wanted to find you and how much I’ve thought about you these last five years.”
His surprise was not the kind you could fake. “I had no idea.” He was shaking his head slowly. “I wish I’d known.”
“Well, you didn’t know, maybe, but somehow he must have known how desperate I was to see you again. He came up to me at school saying he was you. I didn’t believe it at first. But he knew these things he couldn’t possibly have known otherwise. That’s what I thought, anyway. I’ve learned such unexpected things about the world in the past few years, I don’t know what is possible and what isn’t. The same kinds of mysterious things you said to me at that party, he seemed to know. He said you’d died, which is what I already thought, and had come back in a new body. He even explained this complicated thing of how he went from an old body to a new one.”