My Deja Vu Lover (11 page)

  
“Um. Fifteen, huh?
 
I could hear Glenda and I could hear music. Something I liked then, I think, can’t remember what. That’s the way the whole session went, I could hear music and sometimes voices but never see anything.”

  
“You lack faith in hoaxes,” Macbeth said.

  
“What’s that mean?”

  
Cyd said, “It means Macbeth fell asleep when Glenda told him to close his eyes, so now he’s mad because he wasted a whole afternoon that he could have spent at his computer.”

  
“Draw your own conclusions, as usual,” he said.

  
“Don’t have to, I heard you snoring.”

  
He smiled at that, didn’t deny snoring.

  
I was afraid to tell them what I had seen. I wasn’t sure I wanted to try to explain again about Hollywood and Laurence and the whole weird scene.

  
Cyd read my silence. “You saw a past life.”

  
Macbeth startled me by sitting up quickly and saying, “You don’t have to tell us. Come on, let’s phone out for pizza.”

  
“Why shouldn’t April have a turn?” Cyd asked.

  
I shook my head. “Nothing else to say. I didn’t see anything new.”
 

  
“Right, no connection between sleeping on the floor and regressing a lifetime,” Macbeth said.

  
“Next time, try staying awake, bloody boy. I bet if you regressed, it’d turn out that you were Napoleon.”

  
“That’s the problem with reincarnation,” Macbeth said. “Everyone remembers being a king or emperor or some hero, like Patton believing he’d been Alexander the Great.”

  
“Did he really?” I said. “Then my visions can’t be reincarnation. I was Millie from Minnesota, nobody, another small town girl who ran off to Hollywood, I guess.”

  
The only thing real was the way I felt, emotions that tore me apart, left me, or Millie, on the edge of hysteria. Because it was me behind the wheel of that car and it was the only piece of history that mattered. Had it happened or was it coming up in the future?
 
That’s what I had to find out.

  
Macbeth said, “The thing is a hoax. I wouldn’t want to waste more time on it.”

  
“I would,” Cyd said.

  
And somehow, that’s where the episode ended. We never went back. The experiment was interesting but didn’t show us anything new. Cyd and I recognized memories we were already familiar with.

  
Tom, I suspect, remembered a few high school girl friends but preferred not to say so.

  
And Macbeth stuck with here and now.

CHAPTER 9

  
Although I had only spoken to Graham Berkold once, when he phoned I recognized his voice. It was that kind of voice, made my breath catch in my throat.

  
“I’m sorry that I have nothing much for you, April. My movie buff experts ran a bit short on expertise. One of them thought he did remember the name Silver. And all three of my colleagues agreed that the name Laurence was popular in the twenties and could have been any of a half dozen actors or a couple of dozen extras from the silent films era. None of them were famous enough to be recorded as dying in a tragic accident.”

  
“Recorded?
 
Would they be?”

  
I could practically hear his smile. Certainly I could see it in my mind. “The stars would, if they died during their working years. Tragic deaths were headline magic in Hollywood, still are, I suppose, but more so back then because the publicists could make up glamourous deaths. There would be no one on TV the next day to report the autopsy.”

  
“Bit players didn’t get much attention, huh?”

  
“Afraid not. Besides web searches, which I am sure you’ve already done, one of my friends made a few phone calls to other film experts. Sorry, April. Much as I regret saying this, I don’t think Laurence or Silver ever achieved fame.”

  
Bummer that he hadn’t learned more, but I didn’t care about the fame thing. “It was really great of you to check out that much. Guess I’ve wasted your time.”

  
Another long pause and then that chuckle. “I haven’t given up. Maybe if we knew each other better in this life we could remember a missing clue about a past life. Do you think?”

  
Did I believe a word this man said? No. Did that make me any less stupid? No. Moth to flame, I said, “Maybe so.”

  
“I own a vacation cottage and I have to drive over and check it this afternoon after last night’s storm. Want to ride along?
 
We could stop for dinner on the way back.”

  
“Uh.” My mind went blank. Go to a cottage with a man I didn’t know? Oh, right, I knew his name, could tell Cyd who I was with. He taught at the university, an easy person to find if I somehow disappeared. Oh God, I had to stop watching the evening news. “Where is this cottage?”

  
“About an hour’s drive. Maybe a little more if we hit traffic.” He told me the name of the bay and the address of the cottage. I had never heard of the area but I did write it down on the note I left for Cyd.

  
He added, “Wear a warm coat and flat shoes. It’ll be windy but I think you’ll enjoy the view.”

  
When he pulled up in front, I was ready. I could have waited for him to come to the door and ring the bell. Didn’t. I hadn’t mentioned him to my friends and they’d be home soon. Not that it was any of his business, but Macbeth had an unpleasant way of disliking my dates. He could be super polite without cracking his face with any hint of a smile.

  
“Ignore him,” Cyd always told me.

  
If he met Graham, he’d do his intensive stare thing, have it written all over his face that the man was too old and should be ashamed of himself, making a pass at poor little not-too-bright April. Macbeth was the best and worst of friends, always there in an emergency, always ready to give opinions.
           

  
Graham’s cottage was on a hillside above the Sound. He turned his car off the road and drove down a short stretch of gravel drive and parked in a flat dirt parking area rimmed by dripping salal shrubs and tangled vines. Stepping out of the car into the cold, brilliant winter sunlight, I stared against the wind until my eyes watered. It was a gorgeous day of clear blue sky, with wheeling gulls and sharp sea smells. To the west, the islands and peninsulas were dwarfed by the distant snow-covered Olympic mountain range.

  
Graham caught my elbow. We were both dressed in windbreakers and jeans, mine in matching denim blue, but Graham’s coat was suede and his jeans were black. He led me to the edge of the parking area and down a path cleared between ferns. The path wound down the hill toward several small cottages that huddled into the hillside’s tangle of greenery. Graham’s place was the first one, set directly below the parking area, at a drop of twenty feet or less and wasn’t visible until we started down the path.

  
“This place belonged to my grandparents,” he said.

  
The trees had been cleared to open the view but they had returned unbidden, as trees do in rain country. There were tall skinny fir trees and clumps of shorter alders with their silver-gray trunks, and under the bare alder branches, a carpet of fir seedlings and ferns. The trees had been whacked away in haphazard patterns as each cottager freed his own view. They were junk trees, really, re-growth, allowed to return because their roots helped hold the soil stable against winter mudslides.

  
Leading me down a slippery path to a sagging wooden porch, with a moss-covered roof and latticed ends, Graham said, “With all the wind last week, I need to check the shingles. I don’t get out here much in the winter.”

  
He pushed aside a butterfly bush that had grown across the porch stairs, its lanky stems still tipped with last August’s lilac-shaped flowers, dried brittle into brown spearheads. The wet boards of the stairs and porch were slick beneath our shoes. The paint had peeled away from the siding, exposing layers of dark green, then red, then white beneath the most recent coat of gray. The screen door was missing half of its screen. The inner door creaked on its hinges.

  
Bowing me in, with a deep bend and a wave of his arm, Graham said, “Welcome to my humble abode, lovely lady.”

  
The inside of the cottage was another world, crammed with a sagging couch and wicker rockers, strewn with gaudily colored hand-crocheted afghans. Tall bookcases, jammed with dusty books and stacks of old magazines, hid the walls.

  
At one end of the room was a fireplace, its wide brick chimney smoke-blackened, and at the other end there were French doors, painted dark green and matching nothing, that led into a small kitchen. Above the curtained sink were open shelves of dishes. Windows framed the glittering view of Sound and sky.

  
Graham lifted kindling from a box by the fireplace while I wandered through the cottage. A door from the kitchen opened into one cold, damp bedroom furnished with a quilt-covered bed, a wicker chair and table, and a row of wall hooks. A door on its far side opened against the sink of a closet-sized bathroom. Small shiny leaves of a huckleberry bush covered its high window, cutting out most of the daylight.

  
When I returned to the front room, Graham had a fire blazing. He looked up from where he crouched in front of the hearth, the flames outlining in red his light hair, firm jaw line, thin nose. His eyes glittered beneath raised eyebrows. “It isn’t the Hilton.”

  
“I love it,” I said.

  
“It’s been my hideaway since I was a child, my escape from the city. I love the city but it’s nice to know ‘the high green hill sits always by the sea.’”

  
“The high green hill?”

  
“It’s a line from Auden. I’ve thought about carving it on the mantelpiece. Now then,” he said, standing, brushing wood chips from his hands, “suppose you warm your hands by rubbing them picturesquely in front of my fire while I take a quick check of the roof.”

  
“I could put some coffee on,” I said.

  
He touched his fingers to his lips and tossed me a kiss before hurrying outside.

 
 
The shelves were a jumble of mismatched ironstone, the coffee pot an old white enameled campfire type. When I turned on the water tap, the pipes vibrated loudly.

  
Overhead Graham pattered up and down the roof slope in his Adidas and I felt like the troll under the bridge when the Billy Goats Gruff were tripping over it.

  
From a submerged memory I drew up a picture of a beach house in Florida on a shelf of hot sand, its interior and exterior whitewashed, its furniture done up in pale mauve coverings, and the sound of my parents arguments blending with the whine of the air-conditioner. Whose house had that been? We must have only been there for a few months.

  
Graham hurried inside to peer into the coffee pot, making a big show of inhaling the aroma, wrinkling his nose, closing his eyes, and sighing ecstatically until I laughed.

  
I said, “A simple ‘smells great’ would do.”

  
“Smells great? Smells great? Dear April, does one say the sun is a ‘nice light’? You have brewed ambrosia.”