“It’s Ashley,” she shouted at his back.
He peed a few beers’ worth, and when he came out he noticed his barstool had been taken over by the very drunk guy with the cleats, who was leaning directly into Ashley’s cleavage. Her manner had changed.
“What is your problem?” he overheard her say as the guy leaned so far over his stool it started to go. The guy was holding on to her with both hands when she shoved him off and his stool teetered and crashed to the ground. Ashley stood and backed away.
“Stupid bitch!” the guy called after her, getting up arduously. “Come here. Bring your tits back here.” His words were a slurry of spit and gin.
Daniel strode back to the bar. He stood in front of the man as Ashley collected her stuff. The guy turned to Daniel. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
Daniel looked at him, losing what little fun there was to his drunkenness. He looked carefully at the man’s eyes and brows and shoulders and ears and pieced it together. He came up with a face in a bar not unlike this one. But in the winter in . . . someplace. Cold. St. Louis, it must have been. The face had waxy, smeary red lipstick, like girls used to wear back then. A flowery dress with a pair of terrible falsies creeping up out of the neckline. She’d told him she was a model and showed him her picture. It was an ad for a local car dealership. Oldsmobile, maybe. He remembered a lot of ass and leg, and not much face. She was very proud of that picture. She had heard he was interning at his dad’s paper and called him there every day for a month. “I wanna be famous,” she told him.
Don’t say anything, he counseled himself. “I know you,” he said.
“The fuck you do.”
“I do. Ida. I definitely do. You haven’t changed. You drink too much.”
The guy was trying to decide whether to punch him.
“You like posing for pictures. I’m sure you still do. You still like your lingerie and your shoes. Lace and high heels and all. They’re hard to find in your size, though, aren’t they?”
Now the bartender was eavesdropping, and Ashley had floated back toward them to listen.
Had Ida been less drunk, he could have covered his astonishment and his discomfort better. Daniel didn’t feel particularly honored knowing he was right. These were easy things to tell about a person. If you changed gender from one life to the next, it almost always meant you lived in some confusion in the middle. And exhibitionism was the kind of neurotic quirk that dogged a person from life to life.
“The fuck you do,” the guy said again, but he had visibly shriveled.
The bar was quiet as Daniel left. He was ashamed of himself. He was disappointed and tired. He used to do that kind of thing. He’d punish people with the secrets and vulnerabilities they didn’t understand. But he stopped many lives ago. They would forget the punishment, eventually, but he would carry it with him.
In his last life, when he was seven, he’d met a man in his uncle’s office who was tormented by his need to have his healthy leg amputated above the knee. Everyone thought the man was deranged, naturally, including the man himself, and no doctor would perform the surgery. But Daniel remembered him from before, and he understood. Not everything, but just a little bit. He remembered that he’d been a soldier and that he’d lost his leg at the Somme when he was seventeen. Daniel told him everything he remembered. But that wasn’t for punishment or retribution. That was mercy.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2006
LUCY WAS ALONE in her dorm room early on a Friday evening in October when the house phone rang from the lobby.
“Is this Lucy?”
“Yes.”
“Hey. It’s Alexander.”
“Alexander? What are you doing here? Are you downstairs?”
“Yeah. Can I come up?”
“Marnie’s not here. She’s in Blacksburg until tomorrow.”
“Can I come up anyway?”
Lucy glanced up at the clock. She glanced down at her pajamas. She’d been planning an evening in her bed with Emily Brontë, but she couldn’t exactly turn Marnie’s little brother away. “Okay. Give me a couple minutes to get dressed.”
He didn’t give her a couple minutes. He was knocking on the door inside of one minute.
She let him wait. When she opened the door he almost tackled her in a hug.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him again when she got loose of him.
“I’m college visiting.”
“Really? Are you a senior already?”
“Yes, I’m a senior already.” He might have looked hurt if he was capable of it. “I’ll be eighteen in January.”
“Does Marnie know you are here?”
He shrugged. “I might have mentioned it to her. I’m pretty sure I did.”
“Well, that’s funny, because she didn’t mention it to me, and also she went to Blacksburg.”
He shrugged again without looking the least bit rueful. She’d known Alexander since he was a baby, and he was probably the most well-meaning and least conscientious person she knew.
“Can I stay anyway?”
He had an absurdly appealing smile, and he always had.
“Do your parents know you’re here?”
“Sure,” he said, as committally as he said anything.
She laughed in spite of herself. “Okay, I guess you can stay.” She’d barely finished the sentence when he’d thrown his bag on the ground and jumped onto Marnie’s bed and lay back on it.
“You grew more,” she said.
He nodded. “You stayed the same.”
“Your hair grew more.” He had wonderfully curly, sandy-colored hair. She and Marnie used to style it when he was little and they could get him to sit still.
He jumped up and went over to Sawmill’s terrarium. “You still have that snake?” he asked incredulously.
Lucy sighed. At this rate it was going to live longer than Dana had. “Yeah, you want him?”
Alexander laughed. “Let’s go out. Are there any parties? Can we go to a college bar? I brought my fake ID,” he said eagerly.
Lucy cast a longing look at Wuthering Heights. It was raining out and damply cold, but she felt a big-sisterly obligation to show Alexander the kind of college experience he’d no doubt been fantasizing about.
TWO PARTIES, one bar, and a pub later, Lucy was tired and very drunk. Alexander loved to dance, so they had danced. She saw how many of the girls watched him, and she found herself appreciating him in a new way. Two and a half years had seemed a bigger difference when she was ten or even sixteen.
Oh my God, what would Marnie say if she knew Lucy was looking at her little brother this way? She hoped he wasn’t thinking this was a date or anything. She’d tried to encourage him to dance with other girls, but he hadn’t gone for it.
“I’m hungry,” Alexander declared, putting his arm around her a little sloppily. He was about a foot taller than she was.
He’d wanted to hold her and grind on the dance floor all night. She was getting used to the feeling of his body, and it didn’t feel like such a big deal. There wasn’t an awkward bone in him.
“Me, too. You want to get a slice?”
“God, yes!”
They walked in the rain to a place on West Main Street. The bright lights inside made her feel extra drunk. Alexander gallantly whipped out his wallet and paid for three slices of pizza, one for her and two for him. Outside, they sat on the bench and ate as though they were starving. Lucy wasn’t cold anymore, but her sweater smelled like a wet dog.
“Do you remember when Marnie and I used to put ponytails and mini-buns all over your hair?”
He laughed. “Do you remember when Dorsey ate your birthday cake?”
“Do you remember when Tyler peed in your Mountain Dew can?”
He nodded. “When he handed it to me the can was warm. That’s what made me suspicious.” He chewed his pizza. “Do you remember when you babysat for me and made me pancakes with raspberries in them for dinner?”
“Did I do
that?”
“You put raspberries in everything.”
“No, I mean, did I babysit for you?”
“Marnie was supposed to, but she snuck out with a guy and you covered for her.”
“I think I do remember that. Weren’t you kind of old for a babysitter?”
“Yeah. I was fourteen. It was because my parents went to some resort for their anniversary.”
“They went to the Greenbrier for the weekend. I do remember that.”
“Can I confess something to you?” By the look on his face, she wasn’t sure she wanted him to. “I climbed up the side of the house and watched you getting into the shower.” He looked more pleased with himself than guilty.
“Alexander.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t look sorry.
She felt her face getting warm. “I can’t believe you did that.”
“It was wrong,” he said. “But it was worth it.”
She punched him in the stomach.
He was laughing. “It was. I’d do it again.”
She tried to punch him again, but he grabbed her arms and started wrestling her. Before she could right herself he was kissing her.
“Alexander, stop,” she said, laughing, trying to pull away.
He kissed her more. “Why? I don’t want to stop.”
“You’re Marnie’s little brother. I’m too old for you.” She didn’t really want him to stop, and he seemed to know it.
The rain started to come down harder, and he grabbed her hand. “Let’s go back to the room,” he said.
Out of the frying pan, she realized as they scurried along back streets to Whyburn House. She had not meant to go this far in realizing his college fantasies. Don’t do this, she ordered herself. She reminded herself about being big-sisterly.
“It’s late, and we’re going right to bed. Different beds,” she clarified as she turned the key in the door of her room. “Deal?” She looked up at him. Was he smirking?
He left her alone long enough to dry off and go to the bathroom, brush her teeth, and put on a pair of unsexy flannel pajamas. When she got back to the room he was lounging on Marnie’s bed in a pair of boxer shorts like he owned the place.
“I’m turning out the light. You stay on that side of the room or you’re going to have to sleep in the hallway, got it?” She turned out the light and got under her covers.
“You don’t mean it,” he said mournfully.
Not at all, she thought. “Yes, I do,” she said.
She lay there in the dark. She could barely breathe, let alone fall asleep. She kept seeing the way his torso looked just before she’d flipped off the light. It was as if it was burned into her retinas. He started humming something.
What was her problem? So he was young. So he was Marnie’s little brother. What was she waiting for? Here he was, presented to her in all his glory as though on a clamshell, and she was going to try to fall asleep? Daniel was gone. He was never a good excuse, and certainly not anymore. Daniel had always been an idea, a category where nobody else fit. Alexander belonged to a different category. But Alexander’s was the category where life actually took place. Alexander was here and his mouth was warm and she wanted him in her bed in a way that didn’t seem to involve any ideas at all.
“Hey, Alexander?” she whispered.
His head popped up. “Yeah?”
“Come here.”
He arrived in her bed as though shot from a catapult. In a fraction of a second he was under her covers, kissing her, wrapping himself around her.
I can’t believe I’m doing this.
“If Marnie ever finds out, I’ll kill you,” she whispered as he crawled down under the sheet. It was maybe not the most romantic thing to say, but he was undeterred. He nodded against her belly button.
He pulled off her pajamas with one hand, demonstrating the flair of a person who had done it hundreds of times. He probably had done it hundreds of times. He was sexy and charming and uncomplicated. Easily half the girls at Hopewood High School were in love with him, according to Marnie, and he loved them all right back. He’d probably slept with every unmarried girl between the ages of fifteen and thirty in the entire town of Hopewood. And he’d probably done it in a manner so good-natured that nobody thought any worse of him for it. It was a handy thing that he had a condom ready. He probably had them stashed in his pockets and in his shoes and behind his ear, just in case.
She had one other urgent concern as he took off her last sock. Please, she thought urgently. Please don’t ever find out this is my first time.
“YOU HAVE TO GO,” she informed Alexander when he woke up in the morning.
“Why do I have to go?” he said groggily. “I think you should get back in bed with me. I like college visiting.”
“Because Marnie will be back before noon, and if she sees us, she’ll guess what happened.”
“No, she won’t.”
“Oh, yes, she will.”
“Lucy,” he complained.
“Get dressed, mister.” She pointed to his clothes on the floor. “Come back another time. Anyway, when you go college visiting, aren’t you supposed to visit classes and meet with the admissions people and stuff?”
He laughed, almost chastened but not quite. “Okay, fine, I’ll go.” He sat up in bed. “If you come back here for a minute.”
“Alexander!”
She did go back there, for more than a minute. Then she marched him down to the lobby and sent him off. He managed to grab a full kiss on the lips before he got into his mother’s blue Suburban.
“See you, Lucy,” he said cheerfully.
On her way back through the lobby, Claude, the security guard, stopped her with a wink. This was her second year in his dorm, and she knew he wasn’t going to let her get away without a comment of some sort.
“New boyfriend?” he asked.
It was pretty obvious Alexander had spent the night. She wasn’t sure how brazenly she could lie.
“No.”
“No? Good-looking young man.”
“That he is.”
“I liked the other one, if I may say so.”
“What other one?”
“The young gentleman who came looking for you last year.”
“Who was that?”
“Big like the one today, but dark hair. Nice face.” Claude had a thoughtful look. “Sad face.”
Lucy had been eager to run for the elevator and remove all traces of her night of debauchery, but something about the way he said it stopped her.
“That other one was very fond of you, I think,” Claude added.
“I can’t think of who he could be. Where was I?”
“You and your friend had just moved out for the summer.”
“And he asked for me?”
“Yes. He was disappointed not to find you.”
She tried to think who it might have been. “Has he been back here?”
“Haven’t seen him since. Not on my watch. I’ve kept my eye out.”
“Huh. You don’t remember his name by any chance, do you?”
“He didn’t introduce himself, I don’t believe, but he did hand me his ID.” Claude screwed up his face and thought for a minute. “I think his name was Daniel.”
OF ALL THE nights in Lucy’s life, this was going to be the one when she didn’t fall asleep thinking about Daniel. This was the night when her body felt a little sore and a little as if it belonged to somebody else, and when her bed still felt and even smelled faintly foreign. This was the night she had every intention of falling asleep to vivid thoughts of Alexander: his generosity, his expertise, and the many weird and thrilling sensations she’d felt with him.
But as she bunched up her pillow and changed position a hundred times, her thoughts kept creeping down to the lobby and to the young man with the sad face who had come looking for her and who might have been named Daniel. And even on this night of nights, because of good Claude Valbrun and his uncertain memory, she found herself leaving he
r body behind and falling asleep yet again with the distant idea of Daniel.
HASTONBURY HALL, ENGLAND, 1918
For a few hundred years I had been migrating slowly westward, like the sun. I have an unconfirmed theory that many of us do this. I’m not sure why, and not every soul lives enough times to make that trip. Some souls live once. At least one soul, Ben, has probably completed the entire circle. But if the East strikes you as ancient and wise and the West foolish and new, there probably is some basis for it.
I was born near Bucharest, in Montenegro, twice outside of Leipzig, in the Dordogne. I picked up a number of languages and skills along the way, as you might imagine. I seem not to dip too far south or climb very far north. I’ve been born in Africa only once, in the east, in what is now Mozambique, and never have I felt more blessed or forsaken than in that beautiful, remorseless place. I still dream of the darkness of my hands sometimes; it’s part of who I am. And then there was that one cold life in Denmark. But otherwise I seem to track along the fat haunch of the northern hemisphere.
I found Sophia only briefly at the end of a short, crushing life in Greece. I had traveled to Athens from Montenegro on a trade mission. I was a statesman and a merchant then, in control of a large fortune. It was one of a spate of lives in which I amassed power and money because I could, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. It took a half-dozen of those lives for me to recognize the difference between a means and an end.
I was pretty satisfied with myself at that time. I had a fat wife and two beautiful mistresses, one young and one old. I had a castle overlooking Dalmatia and hundreds of artworks I socked away and never looked at. I never forgot about Sophia, but the idea of her had grown dimmer in my mind.
So there I was on a street in Athens in all my finery, surrounded by an entourage of men who gasped at my wit and laughed at my jokes, when I caught sight of her. She was at the end of an alley, dark-skinned and black-eyed and huddled over a hunk of bread. She’d probably stolen it, because as I walked toward her she began to run. I ran after her, leaving my attendants in confusion. I was pretty fat and gouty myself at the time, and it took me several minutes to catch her. When I did she was crying. I reached for her, and she felt as though she was made of sticks and rags.