“I know you from somewhere,” Lucy said to the woman in her dream.
“Of course you do, darling,” the woman replied.
When Lucy woke she lay in bed for a long time, trying to hold the face of the dream woman in her mind. She knew her from somewhere, but she couldn’t think of where.
When she got up she went into her closet and found the monograph from the gift shop at Hastonbury. She turned to the chapters on the gardens and stared at the photographs, incredulous. It was no wonder the dreams were so literal. This was Constance’s mother’s garden. This was the garden she had lived in as a little girl a couple of lifetimes ago. She shut the book again. She didn’t want to supplant her dreams quite yet.
She spent the weekend making drawings of the garden in her dream and, when she was satisfied with them, comparing them to real pictures from Hastonbury. Her dream garden was far lovelier and more complete than in the photos in the monograph or the ones she found online, but hers matched them in every particular she could find. But it was the picture in the back of the book that stopped her heart. She’d glanced at it before, but she’d never really looked. Now that she did, she knew exactly who it was. It was the woman she’d dreamed in the garden. Of course it was. It was Constance’s mother.
ON THE TWELFTH night the dream changed. The garden started to lose its borders. It extended farther and in new directions. She followed one path and she found herself in her own backyard before the blight that killed her raspberries. In another direction she found herself in Thomas Jefferson’s gardens of the Academical Village at school, enclosed by the serpentine walls. She walked a different way and found, to her amazement, her swimming pool with the flowers up to the very edge, just as it existed in her drawings and in her imagination.
By the morning after the twelfth night she knew what she wanted to do. She found the application online and printed it. She spent the day filling it out and included the best of her schematic drawings from her dreams of the Hastonbury gardens and her sketches of the herbs. On a whim, she also included her three favorite drawings of her unbuilt swimming pool.
On the thirteenth day she put it all in a large envelope, brought it to the post office, and mailed it. On the fourteenth day she began to weed her garden.
TWO MONTHS LATER, on the night in August before she left home for real and for good, Lucy was packing up her room when she realized something. She couldn’t take Dana’s snake with her. Sawmill was apparently going to live forever, and she wasn’t. Without giving herself too much time to think about it, she picked him out of his box and let him curl around her arm. He looked at her, and she looked at him. “I’m sorry we didn’t enjoy each other more,” she told him. “You were never my pet of choice.”
She walked downstairs, through the kitchen, and out the back door, letting the screen door slap behind her. She walked across the yard and sat down cross-legged on the grass in front of her hydrangea bush. She gave Sawmill a last look in his snake eyes. She’d always thought that snakes represented evil and duplicity, and she’d always figured Dana had gotten him as one more badass parent-punishing act. But as Lucy admired his calm little head, she didn’t think that anymore. She thought of his skins over the years, the spent versions of himself he’d left behind as he was constantly reborn. Maybe that was what he meant to Dana.
“Time to be free,” she said solemnly. She put her hand down to the ground to see what he would do. He clung to her for a few seconds. But then he reached his head out courageously. He unspooled from her wrist by inches, reaching out and hovering over the unfamiliar earth. At last he dove down to the soil and slithered away inside the grass of her old pleasure dome.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, VIRGINIA, 2009
THE THING LUCY had once wanted to happen more than anything else in the world, that she had given up on ever happening, did actually happen a little after six o’clock on a Tuesday evening in January.
She was sitting outside Campbell Hall, the building that housed the landscape architecture program along with the rest of the School of Architecture, where she’d spent the previous ten hours in the studio. Now she sat in a hungry daze, wearing her down coat and brown wool hat, breathing the cold air and giving herself a moment of peace before she rejoined the rhythm of the regular world.
Marnie and her boyfriend, Leo, were making Chinese food for dinner that night in their tiny apartment by Oakwood Cemetery. They’d rented the apartment in August. Marnie was working at Kinko’s by day while taking an LSAT prep course and applying to law schools by night. Lucy had expected to be working full-time as a barista at the Mudhouse through the fall and early winter. She’d gotten her application for graduate school in so late, the admissions officer told her she’d have to wait until January to begin the master’s degree program. But a space had opened up, and to Lucy’s exhilaration they had bent the rules and allowed her to start in September. So she was working only ten hours a week at the Mudhouse and going deeply and calmly into debt to pay for graduate school. She and Marnie had rented the apartment, just the two of them, but since then Leo had become the unofficial third nonpaying roommate. At least he was a good cook.
“Does it make you lonely now that Marnie has a serious boyfriend?” her mother had asked her a few weeks earlier. Lucy could tell it made her mother lonely. “Not really,” she’d said. “I’m busy in the studio.”
“You’re not still waiting for Daniel, are you?” Marnie had asked her accusingly last Saturday, when Lucy had declined to go to a party with her and Leo.
“No,” Lucy said. Marnie thought she was perplexingly celibate, and Lucy didn’t correct her. She couldn’t admit to Marnie that she’d slept with her brother, Alexander, four times over the past summer.
Lucy wasn’t still waiting for Daniel. Not in her conscious mind. She’d made herself accept the fact that he wasn’t coming for her this time around. But in her dreams she still longed for him. Her dream-self thought the story of her and Daniel was only paused; it wasn’t over. I can’t wait for you forever, she found herself thinking as she lay in bed most mornings, thinking about her dreams, waiting for her alarm to ring.
And now she was sitting on the bench in the winter dark, considering these things, when a young man walked up to her and said, “Are you Lucy?”
She looked up at him, expecting that she should know him. He was well dressed and clean-shaven, like an old-fashioned jock or a former fraternity boy. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t know him. He was probably in one of her classes, and she didn’t feel like cultivating the association.
“I’m Daniel,” he said.
She startled a little at the name, as though it had been lifted from her thoughts. “Do I know you?” she asked. It wasn’t probably the most tactful thing, and if she’d thought to be polite, she would have phrased it differently.
His eyes were secretive in some way. “You might not think so, but you do.”
She didn’t want to play. Usually when she wore her clumpy brown hat pulled down over her face and huddled deep in her coat, she didn’t have to. “And how is that?” she asked without curiosity or pleasure. She picked at the lint on her gloves. Maybe he’d been in one of her undergraduate classes. Maybe he was a friend of a friend who’d put him up to this because members of Lucy’s circle thought she needed to get out more.
He bent down closer to her, like he was trying to get her to look at him again. “I know I look different now. I know it will be hard to make you believe it, but I am Daniel. The Daniel you used to know.”
Now she did look up at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I knew you in high school. I knew you many times before that.”
She stood up, both doubtful and beginning to feel electrified. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m Daniel Grey. From Hopewood.”
She could barely keep herself upright. “You’re telling me you are Daniel Grey?”
“Different, as you see. But yes, I am.”
She stared at him, searchin
g his eyes. “How can you be?”
“Do you want to walk with me?” He started walking, and she followed him. She felt dizzy, as though everything was at the wrong angle. She was shivering and also sweating in her coat. He had a long stride, and she took extra steps to keep up.
“I don’t know how much you know about me,” he said, looking forward, not at her.
She stared at the side of his face. Was this some kind of weird prank? He couldn’t really be her Daniel, could he? It almost felt like her old longing was so fierce it had turned somebody up, whether or not it was the right person.
“I don’t think I know anything,” she said and immediately realized it wasn’t true. “I mean, I might know something.” She hurried along. What if it really was him? Maybe it was. She tripped on a curb and splashed her pants with mud and slush. “I know about Constance,” she said quickly. “I know about Sophia.” She wasn’t caring about self-protection right now. She didn’t care about whether she sounded sane or not.
“You know a lot, then,” he said. His voice was sharper, different than she expected.
She wished she could look him in the eye again. How could it be him? If it wasn’t him, why was he doing this? She was open to the idea of people coming back in different bodies, but this didn’t make any sense. “I don’t understand you,” she said. “I don’t understand how you could be Daniel. If you died at the bridge three and a half years ago, then you would be a little kid now, wouldn’t you?”
In her fantasies of seeing Daniel again, she’d pictured running into his arms, holding him for hours at a time and telling him everything that she had learned and thought since the last time she’d seen him. This wasn’t how it went.
“You don’t understand, and I can’t explain it all to you. There are mysteries no one understands. But when you’re like me, you don’t need to grow up every time. In rare cases you can . . . take over a body that has been abandoned.”
“What does that mean?” She was in a wild and wilder version of the universe, but at least she was in a conversation with someone besides herself. “You can take over somebody else? Why would anyone abandon their body?”
“Usually it’s not a choice. Sometimes it is. They abandon it when they die.”
“But if they die, it’s because it doesn’t work anymore, isn’t it?”
“Yes, usually. But people sometimes . . . How can I put it simply? They get out before they have to. They get scared and drawn away. It’s tempting in that moment.”
“Why is it tempting?”
“Because usually they are in pain, and it feels better to get out.”
Lucy tried to read her own feelings, but beyond the pounding symptoms of shock, she couldn’t. “And you take over?”
“The opportunity is extremely brief. And the body has to be salvageable, obviously.”
Distantly, she wondered how this conversation might sound to a passerby. They were walking too fast to be overheard for long, and besides, she was too strained, too overwhelmed to really care. But what were these things they were saying? How could she even begin to accept it, and how could she not? Had she given up all expectation that the world would behave in the old way? “But what happens to them? What if they want back in?”
His look was unequivocal, almost demanding. “They don’t.” Was this a way that Daniel had looked? “I only take what’s left,” he said. For a moment he covered her gloved hand with his bare one. “And the soul that was there goes on to their next stage, whatever that is.”
“Do they come back in a new body?”
He rubbed his cold hands together. “Most likely. Most people do come back.”
Some part of her wanted to run away, and she felt disgraced by that part of her. She was so full of doubts; she always ruined everything. After what she’d learned, why couldn’t she just try to believe him? The fact that she was having a conversation like this meant it had to be Daniel. Who else knew about these kinds of things? “So you just sort of . . . jumped into this person you are now. There used to be somebody else in there?”
“It’s hard to fathom, I know. There is so much about birth and death and everything in between that ordinary people don’t know. But you are beginning to grasp that, aren’t you?”
She walked into a puddle. She barely felt the cold soak into her socks. “I think so,” she said.
He stopped. He held out his hands, and she realized he held them out for hers. She gracelessly shoved her hands in his, and he squeezed them.
“Lucy.”
She nodded. She felt the pressure of many tears behind her eyes, though she couldn’t explain their nature. It made it harder to look at him.
“I am happy to see you. Are you happy to see me?”
The things she had imagined saying to him all these times, she couldn’t say unless she knew it was him, and she still couldn’t feel sure.
“It’s hard to believe you are Daniel,” she said honestly. She tried to look into his eyes, but he was busy pulling off her gloves. “Are you really Daniel?”
“I am really Daniel,” he said.
She nodded again. She could believe him or not. If she didn’t, and it was him, as it almost had to be, she would have blown her chance yet again. She didn’t want to blow it again. “I’m sorry for last time,” she said quickly. “I’m sorry I didn’t try harder to understand.” One or two of the tears made it out.
“I don’t blame you for that. No one ever believes it. And it’s probably for the best.”
“But I wish I had tried.”
“Right. I know.” He was looking down. “There are things in the past you regret.”
His expression was different from how she thought it would be. But then, what did she think it would be? Why did she pretend to herself that she knew him or had reason to expect or think anything? She didn’t know him then, and she didn’t know him now. Her only relationship, as Marnie had put it, was her relationship with her own imagination. And now she was trying to hold him to that?
“But we have the chance to start again.”
She stared at him in some wonder. His words managed to penetrate her fight with herself. The problem was not the difference between this man and the old Daniel. The problem was between Daniel and her imagination. Of course, the actual Daniel was going to be different from the Daniel with whom she had spent so many hours in the privacy of her mind. It took the real thing to show you the size of your delusions. It made her think of when the Dominion power company couldn’t get into her basement. They sent estimated bills for eight straight months, and when the guy finally read the meter he told her parents they’d been so far off they owed four thousand dollars.
“If you want to,” he added.
They could start again? Could they just do that? Is that what would happen now if she let it?
This was Daniel. It didn’t feel like it yet, because she was shallow and bound by her own fantasies, but it was. If she was really going to favor her delusions over the real person, then she should just get a lot of cats and shut herself in right now.
He looked different before, but now that she took a moment to think of it, she looked different, too. In high school, every time she saw him it was in full pose and pucker. She had a constant coating of lip gloss and her cheeks sucked in and her precise jeans and hair all going in one direction. Now she was distracted and absorbed by other things, forgetting to look in the mirror at all. She forgot to make her face for anyone’s eyes anymore. She was lucky he didn’t run in the other direction.
Her entire life had once ground to a halt because of him. Her sense of the world was blown open because of him. Would she really not take this chance? Her cowardice had kept her from him before, and it would stop her again if she let it. She was older now. She was on her feet. She could handle it now.
“Yes,” she said. Another tear got out.
He smiled at her. It was a different smile from the one she expected. And then she wanted to punch herself. No expecting.
> “I’m up in D.C. now, working at a marketing firm. I’ve got to go back for a business thing tonight. I didn’t know I’d find you on my first try. If I’d known, I would have left myself all night. But I’ll be back this weekend, all right? Can I take you out on Saturday? What’s your favorite restaurant here?”
She was a little bit crestfallen that he was leaving already, but she was also frankly relieved. She could torment herself better on her own. “Yes. Okay.” She named a place twenty minutes east. “I’ll meet you there,” she said nervously. She realized she didn’t want him coming to her apartment. She wouldn’t know how to explain him to Marnie.
“Great.” He leaned in and kissed her cheek, catching the very corner of her mouth. He straightened up and strode away, calling good-byes over his shoulder.
She stood still, feeling the kiss sitting unabsorbed on her face. When he was very small and ready to disappear around the bend into a parking lot, she composed her face with the thought that he would turn around another time, but he didn’t look back. Shut up. You don’t know anything, she said to her own disappointment.
She began to walk. Without thinking, she ended up at the serpentine wall, where she climbed up and sat with her knees pressed to her chest and her arms holding her together. It was a hard world to know anymore.
What was wrong with her? Daniel had come. Why was she so weird and prickly feeling? Why didn’t she throw her arms around him? We have the chance to start again, he’d said. What was her problem? What more had she wanted to hear?
This isn’t how I thought it would feel.
Could she not get over the fact that he looked different? Was she really that superficial? It wasn’t that he didn’t look good; he did. He was plenty handsome in every objective sense. Maybe more so than before.
A stubborn, renegade memory of the fateful night with the old Daniel came to her. It gave an instant stretch and tingle to her abdomen. When he pulled her in that desk chair to face him. When they were knee to knee. When he kissed her. A four-year-old overworn memory had more punch than a fresh kiss sitting on her face.