Lucy was both frustrated at Constance for haunting her and sorry to Constance for having screwed it up. After all Constance had tried to do, the universe had finally blessed her with a moment alone with Daniel, and Lucy had let him go. He can make you happy. That’s what Constance’s letter said. You couldn’t be too mad at her for wanting that.
Lucy was sorry to Daniel. She wished she could look him in the face and tell him she was sorry. If there was an hour she could cut from her life to redo, it would be that one. And though this new universe allowed for many extraordinary things, it did not allow for that.
You knew you loved him, though. That was offered by a small voice in Lucy’s head, and it stopped her short. She wasn’t sure if it made her feel better or worse. She had loved him. In a stupid, infantile, crushing way. But still. She had been onto something, hadn’t she? She had known he was important to her. She was wildly attracted to him. She would have traded every object she owned for a word from him. She had wanted him, no matter how badly she’d bungled it.
If only she could be with him now. This can’t be the end of the story, she thought desperately.
But either he was drowned in the Appomattox and it was her fault or he was alive and he’d given up on her. If he were alive, as Esme/ Martha insisted, he could find her if he wanted to, couldn’t he? She’d left out plenty of feelers. There was her listed phone number, her forwarding information at this school, her information in the university online directory, her parents’ house, not to mention Facebook and a few other networking sites. He doesn’t want to find you, she told herself. He may or may not have made a small stab at it once, but there was no evidence he’d really tried.
She thought of Marnie’s old mantra: If he liked you, you would know it. The words gave her a funny nostalgia. He had liked her. Or at least he’d been pretty eager to kiss her. Or at least he’d liked her insofar as he thought she was Sophia. She paused in her thoughts. Did that mean Marnie was right or Lucy was?
That was another thing she wondered. Who was Sophia? When was Sophia? Was Sophia much longer ago than Constance? How much longer ago? She held her upper arm. There was a scar there, as Constance had predicted, but it was from a fishing hook; she hadn’t been born with it. Was there any of Sophia left? How much did a soul really account for? Was there any part of Sophia still lingering in her memory and on her person? Probably nothing at all. Probably Daniel’s devotion was the only thing she had left, and now she’d lost that, too. Once he figured out he loved a girl who no longer existed, he’d finally withdrawn it.
Daniel must have loved Sophia to have held on that long. It must have been painful for him to realize she was gone, replaced by a coward.
Lucy got up from the desk and wandered slowly back out the side door of the school. The sun was setting garishly by this time, creating a look of fire and oblivion in the direction of her house as she walked toward it. It was a walk she’d taken about a thousand times, but it didn’t look the same anymore.
It was the letter. It was just an old piece of paper folded up in her purse, but it was powerful enough to break apart the world as she’d known it and consume her mind, sleeping and waking. But it didn’t help her know what to do. It didn’t create a new world in its place. It left her to wander around the rubble of the old one.
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, 1932
When I was a child growing up in the thirties in a suburb of St. Louis I built a pigeon loft on the flat roof of our garage.
I bought eggs from a breeder with old stock and raised them with enormous care. I designed training flights that were meant to be challenging, but my birds always got home before I did. I guess it was as close to fathering as I’ve gotten so far and probably will ever get.
I’ve always loved birds. I collected feathers from rare or beautiful species starting in an early life, and I still have most of them. Someday I’ll turn them over to a natural history museum, maybe. Most of those birds are not just rare now but extinct, in some cases for hundreds of years.
I was always captivated by flight and aviation, and I had a child’s worship for the Wright brothers. I was a child in England at the time of their first public flights. Later I realized that Wilbur had been around for centuries and Orville was brand-new, which always makes for the richest partnerships. (Think of Lennon and McCartney. Try to guess who is the old one.)
In this same life I went on an airplane for the first time, a Curtiss JN-4, “Jenny,” just like the biplanes I watched overhead in the First World War. My father took me to a barnstorming show when I was eight and bought me a ticket to ride. I remember climbing up from the airfield, gazing down in a trance as the field became a small patch in a broad quilt and my father a small figure in the crowd. For the first time I swore I could see the curve of the earth. It was one of the moments when I felt the deepest respect for humankind. There have been a few moments like that. And many times I’ve felt the opposite.
My father also took me to the Lambert-St. Louis Flying Field to watch Charles Lindbergh return from Chicago with a cargo of airmail, one of the very first. I took flying lessons later in that life but hadn’t yet gotten certified by the time I died.
When I think of that life, the thing I always picture is sitting among my birds at dusk every night, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood below, fathers coming home from work and kids riding their bikes and the voices on the wireless rising from living-room windows, satisfied to watch the world taking place below me.
I set up regular messenger routes for the pigeons to and from school. I once sent a note to a pretty girl in my English class that way, and another time sent in my history homework when I’d stayed home sick. Most of the times when I should have been paying attention to my lessons I gazed out the window and thought of the skies while my pigeons gathered on the sill.
One time I gave a pigeon named Snappy to my cousin in Milwaukee when the family came visiting at Christmastime. Snappy drove the seven hours in the car to Milwaukee and made her way back to my house in time for New Year’s. I couldn’t believe it when I saw her walking toward me across the front lawn. My cousin was disappointed, but I couldn’t give Snappy away after that.
One night I was feeling lonely and wistful, and I wrote a letter to Sophia and attached it to the carrying capsule on Snappy’s leg. I sent her off expecting to see her back by dinnertime, but she didn’t come. I waited for a week, and another. When a month had passed, I was miserable. I’d sacrificed Snappy to my hopeless errand, and I felt awful about it.
Years went by, and in lonely moments I sometimes imagined Snappy flying over oceans and continents, mountains, forests, and villages. I dreamed her eyes were mine. I pictured her in Kent, in London, flying across the Channel in the effort to deliver her letter. I pictured her perched on a rooftop of Hastonbury Hall, waiting for Sophia to come home. Sometimes I even fantasized that Snappy had found her and succeeded where I had not.
I kept track of time by the length of Snappy’s absence and Sophia’s advancing age. The day I graduated from high school, Snappy had been gone two years and three months, and Sophia was forty years old. On the first day of my residency Snappy had been gone eleven years and one month, and Sophia was just short of forty-nine.
When Snappy had been gone thirteen years and two weeks, and Sophia was fifty-one, I visited my father, who was ill, at our old house. I went up to the roof of the garage and sat by the old loft as the sun went down. I looked down and saw a grizzled pigeon walking up the driveway. With a familiar gesture, she spread her wings and rose to stand beside me on the top of the loft, where there hadn’t been pigeons for years. I saw that she still had my old letter curled up in the capsule attached to her leg. She couldn’t find Sophia, but at least she could find her way home.
HINESVILLE, GEORGIA, 1968
In the year 1968 I was forty-nine years old, almost as old as I’ve ever been. I remember approaching this sort of desolate-looking playground at an army base—Fort Stewart, I think it was—in Hinesville,
Georgia. The sky was gray, and the equipment was sparse and rusted. I scanned the place, not sure what to expect. There was one little girl swinging on a swing, pumping her legs very determinedly, as though she had just learned how. I looked at my watch, waiting for Ben to show up, knowing I had a long drive ahead of me that night. I waited and watched the little girl swing. She stopped pumping and slowly let the swing fall still. She twisted the chains in her hands and kicked her feet in the dirt.
“Hi, Daniel,” she said. She waved in that open-handed way kids have.
I walked over. “Ben?” I said, surprised.
“No, Laura,” she said. She looked to be about six or seven. “Did you get my letter?”
“I did. I didn’t realize how young you were.”
She nodded. “I wrote in my best writing.”
“How did you find me?”
She shrugged. She kicked up some more dirt so her white shoes and pink ankle socks were filthy. Even when I was a child I carried much of my adult practicality. I didn’t expect she would tell me. I never knew how Ben found me, but it seemed he always could if he wanted to.
“Do you live here now?” I asked.
She nodded, pulling at one of the wooden buttons on her coat. “First in Texas and then in Germany and then here.”
“An army brat, huh?”
She gave me a reproachful look. “I don’t think that’s nice.”
I knew my old friend Ben was in there, along with many others, but it was difficult to see past this little girl. I smiled. “It’s just an expression. I didn’t mean you are a brat. You know that.”
She shrugged again. Her nose was running, and she wiped at it impatiently without bothering with a tissue. Her knuckles and fingers were fat and imprecise, and I found myself staring at them in some wonder.
I never lived in my bodies like that. I always imposed myself on them. I named myself, and I tried to become the same man. I took on the same hobbies and tried to establish the same mode of life. I kept many of the same objects from life to life. I even wore my bodies the same way, same gait, same hair, same gestures, or as near to the same as I could.
“You are a hoarder,” Ben said to me once. “You hate to let go.”
“I am shipping out next week,” I told her. “I’m not sure I’ll be back here for a while.”
“Where are you going?” she asked, starting to swing a little again.
“To Vietnam.”
“Why are you doing that?”
“They need surgeons. I need a war zone,” I said with a little too much lightness. I didn’t believe in the war, but I believed I could save some lives and make some people more comfortable by being there. I hadn’t managed to get myself killed in the civil rights movement, though I got arrested a couple of times. That would have been a death that meant something.
“Why do you need a war zone?”
I studied her eyes to see if I could find Ben in there. It wasn’t easy. I don’t think I could have recognized him if I didn’t know. “Sophia is getting old,” I said with a candor I would use only around Ben. “She must be about seventy. I haven’t found her since the First World War. She disappeared. She must have gotten married and changed her name. I ran into a servant from Hastonbury Hall in the old days. He thought she had moved to Africa.” I zipped my jacket against the cold. “It’s getting time to start again.”
She looked uncomfortable. She pulled at her button again. She got off the swing and walked over to the monkey bars. “I don’t think you can be in charge of that kind of thing,” she said as she climbed.
I felt frustrated suddenly. Ben was the only person in the world who could understand. I wasn’t willing to give that up, no matter what body he was living in. “Ben, I know you understand,” I said.
“I am not Ben.” She shook her head as she launched herself onto the bars.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s easier for me to hold on to the old names. I don’t know how you do without it. I haven’t been anything but Daniel for a long time.”
She listened to me carefully. “But my name is Laura,” she said. She climbed up to the top of the bars and perched there.
“Laura,” I repeated, trying to be cooperative.
“You try to control things too much and you’ll get to be like your old brother and you won’t even die or get born anymore.” She turned away as she said it.
I came closer to hear her better. “What do you mean?”
“You’ll just take bodies that already have a soul in them, so you can be when you want and who you want, and that is just wrong.” When she turned her face back, I could see there were tears in her eyes.
I was aghast. I was silent for a moment. “Is that what he does?” I asked.
She nodded with so much seriousness that I realized why I had been summoned. This was something she needed me to know.
“How does he do it?”
“He kills them first,” she said simply.
I had never heard of that. I had never thought of that. I didn’t know it could be done. “How do you know?”
This was a pointless question to ask her. The longer I knew Ben, the more extraordinary he became. He had recognition, precognition, and everything in between. He seemed to contain the omniverse, with or without the structure of time. And his knowledge wasn’t limited to his experience in the world, as far as I could tell. Once I read a poem about a man with an imagination so great it became the story of the world, and it made me think of Ben. But you couldn’t ask him how he knew things.
“Are you sure?” I asked, also pointlessly. “Maybe you are wrong.”
She fixed her large, feeling eyes on me. “I wish I was wrong.”
She’d said that before—when she was Ben. Then, as now, I wanted her to be wrong and had little hope of it.
“I haven’t seen him in a long time,” I said. “Not for six, seven hundred years. Even then he didn’t recognize me.”
“’Cause he can’t see.” She twisted around on the bars. “He can remember, and he can steal bodies, but he can’t see inside.”
“What do you mean? He can’t recognize a soul?”
She shook her head. “If he could, he would have found you already.”
For a while I watched her swing on the bars. She wanted to show me how she could swing all the way across like Tarzan the Ape Man, and she made me pay attention and not look at my watch or glance at the road behind me through all her tries until she finally got it.
As it got dark I walked with her toward her house.
“I have candy,” she said. She pulled out a packet of Chiclets and unrolled the top. “You can have one.” She pulled out exactly one tiny green Chiclet and held it out to me. Her hands were so sticky and snotty that I didn’t want to eat it, but I took it anyway. “It’s actually gum,” she said with satisfaction.
I nodded. She reached up for my hand and held it as we rounded a corner.
“I live there,” she said, pointing to a small one-story house identical to all the others on the street.
“Okay,” I said. I watched her in pure wonder. How did she carry the story of the world, with all its troubles and pains, in her small head and still manage to act like a little girl? I didn’t understand how she could be so much like an ordinary child.
She looked up at me, knowing my mind, as she always did. “I like to be ordinary, because that makes it easier for my mom,” she said. I watched her tuck her Chiclet packet carefully into her pocket and run home.
CHARLOTTESVILLE , VIRGINIA, 2008
DANIEL HAD BEEN able to find her latest and last housing placement online. In a couple of months her life would become unpredictable again. She would graduate, presumably. He didn’t know what she would do next, and he wasn’t in a position to ask her. It was almost sad, the joy it gave him to see her name in the little letters on his bright screen. It was absurd the amount of pleasure he had in copying her name and address on a piece of paper in his most careful handwriting. Not even her real na
me, just the one she had for now. It meant she was alive in the same world as him. She was where he expected her to be. She was safe.
It was sad in a different way from the anxiety and despondency he felt when he lost her again.
His life had become contemptibly simple, he sometimes felt. He was happy when she was on his grid, troubled when she fell off it. And she did fall off it—for hundreds of years at a time. Knowing where she was in the world, even if he never touched her, gave him a deep satisfaction, and he half despised himself for being satisfied with so little.
I could see her, he told himself. I know where she is. I could find her easily if I wanted to.
It was a wan reassurance. It was an aspect of himself he distrusted. Part of the danger of living so long, knowing you were going to come back and back again, was putting off your life until you never lived it at all. Just so it was possible. Just so long as you could, you never actually did. Just so you didn’t ruin it.
That’s why he drove by her house in Hopewood three different times over the past summer but didn’t stop or knock on the door. That’s why he sat on a bench outside her dorm last November, freezing his ass off for hours, but didn’t call out to her when he saw her rush by. That’s why at night before he fell asleep he checked her Facebook wall for a picture or any update to her status but didn’t disclose that it was he who was her friend.
And though the piece of paper made him happy, it was not actually enough. He carried it with him for a week and a half before he got into his car and made the drive back down to Charlottesville.
He took a day off from work. He wore a fedora he’d kept from the nineteen forties. He wore a pair of sunglasses he’d picked up at a Target two days before. It seemed important to be invisible, but he realized he was more like a caricature of someone wanting to be invisible. He wondered if in fact he wanted to be noticed. If not by her, maybe by someone who might know her and say to her maybe that night or tomorrow: “Remember that weird guy from high school? Daniel something? I saw him on campus earlier.”