Dave turned to Mike. “Ernie Long is signing up voters down at the school auditorium,” he told him. “Tell him to come down here to get Miss Towers.”
“Okay,” Mike agreed. He counted out the money he’d gotten from Mr. O’Hara. Ernie Long was a good choice. He was seemingly fearless. He could negotiate any problem that might arise.
Mike hurried out of the police station. The sun blazed overhead, blinding him. His arm was raised to shield his eyes as he stepped off the curb.
He never saw the speeding car that rounded the corner and tossed him into the air.
I am flying.
My body drops to the ground … but I keep going, light as a feather.
I don’t bother to watch the commotion below. I need to get back to Louisa.
When I soar over her house, she is sitting on the roof. She reaches her arms up to me. She is young again like when I first saw her sing at The Panther: Isis, the nicest on the Nile.
I remember now! I remember! Everything she told me is true!
Below, on the porch, her older self sleeps in her rocking chair. Her face is content.
I sit beside her spirit on the peak of the roof.
My arms are around her. We kiss — such a deep, long kiss.
How could it be that I didn’t recognize my heart’s true love the minute I saw her? What took me so long?
Down on the porch, someone coughs.
Sliding to the edge of the roof, I bend forward to see who it is.
Older Louisa has awakened, not dead as I had believed! She rubs her eyes and slowly pulls herself from her rocker.
Frantically, I check the roof.
My young Louisa is no longer there!
I slide down to the ground beside her as she hobbles toward the road. “Louisa!” I cry. “What happened?”
I know what happened.
Her body rallied and called her spirit back.
I should be glad but I’m not. For a moment I had my love and now I don’t. I’m disappointed and angry.
“I’m here,” I say desperately. She turns toward my voice, almost hearing it, though not quite sure what is calling her. Is it the boll weevils rustling the grass, the sweltering buzz of heat rising off the road?
Louisa stands in the dusty road, leaning on her cane, waiting for me to drive back, to return to her. A hot breeze flattens her skirt against her legs. She knows something is wrong. It’s on her face.
Out in the middle of the cotton field stands an angel.
I know I must go. To remain as a ghost would be to witness more sorrow, bear more loneliness than I can stand.
“Good-bye, my Louisa. You have shown me how it is. I know now that you have been right about the past lives, about everything. Forgive me for thinking you were a little crazy. It didn’t matter to me, anyway, if you were. I loved you more this time than ever before. You are my dharma, my dear one.”
The angel is beside me. Like a Great Bird he rises, taking me with him.
Samantha Tyler shut her eyes and let the music on her iPod flood her head. Outside the moving school bus, the buildings slowly increased in height as they approached Manhattan for their senior geology class outing to the American Museum of Natural History.
She wished she could have skipped school this Friday. Her audition for Juilliard’s college music division was tomorrow. It would have been good if she could have practiced singing her tryout songs or even rested. But this trip was required by her science teacher, so there was no way out of it.
A tap on her shoulder made her jump.
“You were singing along with the iPod again,” her friend Zoë said from the seat beside her. “Loud.” Zoë zipped up her yellow Abercrombie hoodie and fluffed her long red curls. “I have to talk to you. It’s serious.”
“What?”
Zoë lowered her voice. “You told me last night that you were thinking of breaking up with Chris, right?”
“Right.” Samantha ducked lower in the seat so no one would see they were talking. “Don’t tell anyone. I don’t want Chris to find out before I talk to him. That would be nasty.”
“I won’t,” Zoë assured her. “Are you sure you want to do it? He is captain of the football team, after all. I mean, he’s hot.”
“He’s a great guy, too. But … I don’t know. He just doesn’t get me,” Samantha said. It was a hard-to-explain difference that she couldn’t figure out. Chris was nice but somehow they just didn’t connect.
“Maybe you don’t get him,” Zoë suggested.
“It could be,” Samantha admitted.
“Have you definitely made up your mind to break up with him?”
“No. Why?”
Zoë scowled. “Oh. I was just thinking that if you had decided that you wanted to break up with him, you could do it today while we’re at the museum. Then, if he didn’t take it well, you could give him the slip for the rest of the day and it wouldn’t be as awkward as if you broke up with him on a regular school day.”
“True,” Samantha agreed. “Why is this so important to you?”
“You’re my friend,” Zoë replied.
Samantha eyed her suspiciously. Zoë wanted to go out with Chris. Samantha had suspected it for a while and now she was sure. She couldn’t say she wouldn’t mind. It would be weird to have her friend go out with her ex-boyfriend. But it wouldn’t break her heart, either. “I’ll let you know what I decide,” she told Zoë.
“I think you really like that new guy, Jake Suarez, more,” Zoë suggested.
“Do you mean the one who won the archery tournament last Saturday?” Samantha asked.
Zoë poked her. “You are so full of it. You know exactly who I mean. I saw you watching him in the cafeteria the other day.”
“I don’t know him,” Samantha said. “He’s not in any of my classes. But he seems nice and he’s cute.”
“I knew you liked him,” Zoë said.
Samantha swiveled in her seat and looked at Chris sitting at the back of the bus with his football buddies. He noticed her and waved.
She returned the wave and intentionally caught a glimpse of Jake as she turned back around. He was plugged into an MP3 player and reading at the same time: a beat-up paperback called Siddhartha.
Zoë was more right than she knew. Jake was new to the school and from the first instant Samantha saw him he’d gotten to her. She knew exactly when it was. He’d been out on the archery field all alone, probably practicing for the tournament in which he eventually took first place.
She had stopped her trek across the field, riveted by the picture he made: glistening dark curls, straight strong back, his arms pulled back, and his total focus on the target in front of him.
He hit the bull’s-eye in the center of the target.
In that moment she was completely gone; he was all she could think about from then on. Her relationship with Chris went flat almost the next day. It wasn’t fair to him, she knew. But her attraction to Jake was fiercely undeniable. It didn’t feel like she had any choice in the matter.
“You’re right,” she told Zoë. “I’m going to break up with Chris.”
“Would you hate me if I … you know,” Zoë asked, staring down at her hands folded uneasily in her lap.
“You like him, don’t you?”
Zoë nodded.
“It would be okay with me,” Samantha said.
Looking up at Samantha, Zoë smiled. “You’re sure?”
“It’s no big deal. Chris and I have only been going out for a month. I think you and Chris are more suited for each other, anyway.”
They went through the Midtown Tunnel into Manhattan and drove uptown and through Central Park until they came to the museum. The majestic building with its columns and wide steps struck Samantha as oddly familiar, but she couldn’t think of why that might be.
They went into the main entry with its colossal, towering dinosaur skeletons and paid the entry fee, which included access to the planetarium, all halls and special shows, and the IMAX
movie playing that day: Comets — Crashes and Collisions.
Samantha asked Chris if they could talk even before they went into the main part of the museum. “I don’t know how to say this,” she began.
“You want to break up,” he said.
“You knew?”
“It wasn’t hard to tell when you didn’t even want to sit with me on the bus,” he explained.
“Sorry,” she said, wrinkling her forehead. “You’re great but I just think we’re real … you know … different.”
“Yeah, we are,” he agreed. “Okay. See ya.”
“See ya.” Samantha watched as he ran after a group of his friends, thumping one of them on the back in greeting. She breathed a sigh of relief. That had been easier than she’d expected.
Looking around the hall, she realized none of her classmates or teachers were still there. Not wanting to be on her own the whole day, she hurried into the museum.
The place was enormous! Where had all the others gone so fast? She grabbed a floor plan and a schedule of museum events from the stack on a stand. There were certain places they were required by their teachers to go that day. The kids had probably all raced to those spots first to get them out of the way.
She hurried through the shadowy, high-ceilinged halls lined with glassed-in life-size dioramas of different taxidermied animals posed as though they were in their natural habitats. The murals in the background made the scenes appear amazingly lifelike.
Up ahead, she spied Jake Suarez standing alone, peering into one of the cases.
How perfect was this? When would she ever get another chance to talk to him alone this way, under such a totally plausible pretext?
With her heart beating like accelerated time, she approached him.
“Thank God I found somebody from our school,” she said, coming up alongside him. “I’m Samantha. You’re new in school, aren’t you?”
He turned to her and his hazel eyes were unfocused, as though she’d disturbed thoughts that had taken him very far away. “Yeah, I’m Jake. Hi.”
“Do you know where everyone went to?” she asked. “It’s like they disappeared.”
“I think they all rushed up to the Hall of Gems to see that emerald show we have to report on. I was on my way, too, but I stopped to look at this display.”
Inside the glass, a stuffed bison grazed tranquilly. The rest of the herd had been painted into the mural behind the bull. “What a beautiful animal,” he remarked.
“A lot of people would think he was ugly,” Samantha pointed out. “But I see what you mean.”
“They have drawings of them on cave walls that are still around today.”
“So are we,” she mentioned.
He looked at her sharply, as though startled by her words.
“People, I mean,” she clarified. “We’re still around, too. What did you think I meant?”
“I don’t know … nothing. I guess … I was just confused for a second. Want to go to that gem thing?”
“We might as well,” she said, doing her best not to reveal how excited she was to be walking down the hall beside him. This was fate! It had to be! What were the chances of running into him alone like this? Did he know how much she liked him? Had he noticed her watching him every time he went by?
Then she was struck with a new, exciting thought: Had he lagged behind intentionally, noticing that she was behind him? Was he really there waiting for her?
She gazed at him from the corner of her eye. Was that what had happened? Did he feel the same attraction — the same connection — that she did? Oh, how she hoped so.
As they headed toward the Hall of Gems they talked about their college applications. He’d been accepted to the Pace University Theater Department. “I can’t wait to take their playwriting and screenwriting courses,” he said.
“Have you written any plays?” she asked.
“I got a scholarship based on this screenplay I wrote that was set during the Salem Witch Trials.”
“What happened in it?” she asked as they turned the corner.
“It’s about this sailor who meets a girl he’s crazy about and he gives her these earrings as a sign of his love. But her father doesn’t approve of him and one night when he’s trying to see the girl, the father chases him with a gun.”
“Pretty dramatic,” she commented.
He laughed. “I know. I have this crazy imagination. Wait. It gets wilder. The father ships the daughter off to America to marry this creep lawyer and he finds the earrings that the girl has stashed away. He gets so consumed with jealousy that he turns the girl over as a witch and she’s burned at the stake.”
“Oh, that must be a horrible, horrible way to die,” Samantha said as a shiver ran through her. She could see it somehow, as though she was looking out through the woman’s eyes; she saw faces jeering at her. She smelled the acrid burning of the straw as it began to ignite.
The hallway seemed to spin and Samantha lost her footing. She gripped Jake’s arm to steady herself.
“Are you okay?” he asked, guiding her toward a bench.
“I’m sorry, I got dizzy all of a sudden. I just need to sit a minute. Go on with your story.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I will be. Go on.”
“Anyway, she doesn’t know that the sailor has come looking for her. He gets there too late to save her, but sees the earrings there in the ashes of the fire and knows she was wearing them at the stake as a sign of her love for him. He gets the earrings out of the fire and throws them into the Atlantic Ocean.”
“He came back for her and she didn’t know it?” Samantha asked. She wanted to cry. Why was this story affecting her so strongly? “That’s the saddest story,” she said.
“I know,” he agreed. “The saddest part to me is that she died not knowing he had come looking for her. The sailor feels so horrible, like if he’d only gotten there sooner he might have saved her. He blames himself for the rest of his life.”
“He shouldn’t have,” she said. “He tried his best.”
“He should never have let her go in the first place. He was an idiot,” Jake said passionately. “He deserved to be miserable for the rest of his life.”
“You’re too hard on him.”
“He’s my character. I can be hard on him.” He sat beside her, seemingly lost in thought. Then he turned to her. “Feeling any better?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, standing. “It’s a great story.”
“It got me a scholarship, anyhow.”
“How’d you think of it?”
“I don’t know. Stories are always popping into my head.”
As they walked through the museum, she told him about her upcoming audition. “I wasn’t sure whether to apply to their vocal department or their dance department,” she confessed. “I can probably study it all under Performing Arts.”
“I saw you in the school play,” he told her. “You were amazing. I saw you at the gymnastic performance on the balance beam, too. Man, you rocked it. First place!”
“Thanks. Why were you there?”
“My brother, Ato, was on the rings.”
“Oh, yeah, he was good,” she recalled.
“You’re so surefooted,” he commented.
“Thank you. It’s a good thing I wore orthopedic shoes as a kid. I was born with a foot that was turned in, but the orthopedist corrected it and it’s fine now.”
“You’d never know,” he said.
They had arrived at the Hall of Gems. The large poster in front of the room announced the special show the museum had mounted. It read: FAMOUS EMERALDS THROUGH THE AGES. Just as they’d thought, lots of their classmates were inside taking notes on the many displays.
They took out their notebooks as they moved together past the displays. The room was heavily staffed with security guards who kept their eyes on the priceless emeralds locked in glass cases. One of the largest was from Peru. “I can see why they
worshipped this thing,” Samantha said as she read the plaque beside it. “It’s so amazing.”
The green riches were nearly overwhelming, each emerald larger and more spectacular than the last.
Her eyes locked on an item in its own case. “Look at this emerald-studded collar,” she said, peering into the case.
“That’s crazy,” he agreed, stooping to examine it more closely. “I can just picture it on some kind of big cat.”
“You must be psychic,” she commented, coming upon a picture on the placard beside it. The black-and-white photo showed a beautiful dark-skinned woman in a satiny halter dress. She was about seventeen. And at her feet sat a black panther in an emerald-studded collar.
“Let me see that?” Jake said, standing beside her. “Delilah Jones,” he read. He looked up sharply at Samantha. “You look just like her.”
Samantha peered at the photo. “I don’t think there’s any resemblance at all,” she disagreed.
“It’s in the eyes,” he insisted. “You have the same eyes.”
They both studied the photo. Maybe he was right. There was something in Delilah Jones’s eyes that spoke to her deeply, as if she were looking directly into her innermost self.
“What are you humming?” he asked her.
“Was I humming?” she asked, embarrassed. “I didn’t even realize it.”
“Yes, you were humming. I know the song but I can’t think of its name. It sounded like an old song.”
She shook her head, bewildered. “Sorry. I didn’t know I was doing it. It’s gone from my head now.”
“Too bad. It was pretty,” he said, gazing at her intently.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
He smiled apologetically. “Sorry. Every time I look at you I feel like I’m trying to remember something that I can’t get a hold of.”
“Me, too,” she said.
“Really?”
“Really.” When she looked at him she felt it, too. It was something she felt was just out of reach, like trying to recall someone’s name that she once knew but could no longer quite call to mind.