“Just then. Just a little.”
I was beginning to see some possibilities here.
“How am I feeling right now?” I asked.
“You seem to be feeling pretty good.”
“So do something with that.”
And damn. I suddenly felt a little better. A bit lighter. The weight of this crazy world had been lifted from my shoulders.
Andrea smiled at me. My own elevated spirits seemed to have lifted hers as well.
“So there has to be a bit of mind reading involved here, yes?”
“I suppose so. You might call it that. It’s just that I know certain things. I don’t know where the information comes from. In fact, there’s an awful lot I don’t know, so you’ll have to bear with me as I figure things out.”
I was still smiling, still on my emotionally tweaked little buzz of being happy. I took hold of my padlock and was going to turn the numbers when I stopped.
“What’s the combination?” I asked her.
“That’s easy. Right to twelve, left to thirty-seven, right to twenty-one.” She was totally certain she was right. She worked the combination herself, but the lock would not open.
She was one hundred percent wrong. “Sorry,” I said, and cranked back and forth on the dial until the lock snapped open.
Andrea suddenly looked distraught. She was staring at the lock, and I felt like there was a great distance between us. I tried to say something reassuring but couldn’t find the right words.
Then she seemed to remember something. “Of course,” she said. “That couldn’t be your combination. It belongs to someone else.”
“Who?”
“Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important.”
CHAPTER FIVE
Andrea told me to forget about the bus. She wanted to walk.
“You’re going to come home with me?”
“You thought I wanted to stay here at school?”
“My parents are going to love this.”
“Just pretend I’m not there.”
Andrea wanted to walk the old abandoned railway hiking path that follows the river. I’m not sure how she knew about it. Out of the blue she started naming trees and birds. “Oak, chokecherry, tamarack, alder, hemlock, maple. Goldfinch, purple martin, grackle, blue jay, mourning dove.”
It was beautiful walking through the forest like this. I almost never went hiking. I would take the bus home, and my brain would whirr, but I usually talked to no one. I would arrive to an empty house, my dutiful parents still hustling their bonds or houses somewhere else. I had no dog, although I had always wanted a dog. I had a computer program of a dog that my father bought me. When I turned on my computer, it barked and wagged its cybernetic tail on the screen, and I would open a door by clicking the mouse and let it “out” where it barked some more and peed on an imaginary lawn. Sometimes there would be the voice of an angry neighbour yelling at my dog. The dog was not real, so I never gave it a name. Just called it “the dog.”
“How did you learn all the names?” I asked Andrea.
“I don’t know. I seem to have a selective memory. This place, this trail, this forest. It is familiar. I’ve been here before.”
“Like in another life?”
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” she asked.
I stopped and leaned against what I thought was an oak tree. “I’m the guy who believes in everything. When I was younger, my friend Ozzie told me I could fly, so I believed him and I jumped off the garage roof. I flew for a second or two and then hit the ground, but it never occurred to me then that I couldn’t fly. It would just take a little more practice. The Buddhists and Hindus believe in reincarnation, and I’ve never met a Buddhist or Hindu I couldn’t trust. If it is metaphysical, I believe in it. But I don’t think you were reincarnated suddenly as a seventeen-year-old girl. I don’t think it works that way.”
“You think I am seventeen?”
“Am I wrong?”
“I’m sixteen,” Andrea said, but as she said it she seemed to remember something.
“What are you thinking about?”
She shook her head, pointed to a tree with red berries. “Mountain ash. Also known as a rowan tree. Said to have magical powers.”
“Trees are great, aren’t they? Big, heavy-duty photo-synthesis machines. When I grow up I want to be a tree.”
Andrea laughed. She laughed very loudly for a girl of sixteen. “I haven’t laughed like that for a long time.”
“How long?”
“That I don’t know. Let’s stop.”
We sat down by the river, and I stared into the water. First I saw the water moving, then the stuff on the surface — dust and twigs and a few leaves. Then I saw us. Both of us quite clearly. I looked different. Older maybe. A tad less insane looking around the eyes. No one ever came out and said I looked crazy, but I knew that some people thought so. Not Charles Manson crazy, just harmless crazy. In the river I didn’t look crazy. It was like I was watching a movie of a different me — a guy and a girl sitting by a moving river in a world of trees and birds.
And then all of the birds suddenly stopped singing. The image in the river grew fuzzy like a TV with bad reception. It was from a breeze that had come up, stirring the surface of the water. There were clouds now as well — not clouds that said, We’re going to unleash buckets of rain on you and make thunder and hit you with a thirty-thousand-volt thunderbolt. Just clouds.
I was wondering if she somehow did that — made the birds stop singing and the wind start up to erase my movie. And the clouds.
“It wasn’t me,” she said.
“You’re reading my mind.”
“No. Not really. You gave me a look, and I answered the look.”
Because of the change of lighting Andrea looked different. Very pale. Some famous director once said that in movies, lighting is everything. Sometimes this can be applied to real life too. My mind jumped to the conclusion that Andrea was fading, maybe vaporizing in front of me. I didn’t want her to leave, so I reached out to touch her arm.
I touched the cloth of her sleeve. It was cotton, and I slid my hand down until I was touching her wrist. The smoothness of the skin over her wrist left a powerful impression that will last the rest of my days. Then I put my thumb in the centre of her palm, my fingers on her knuckles, and I squeezed a little.
“You’re testing me again to see if I’m real, aren’t you?”
I felt a little silly. “Let’s walk. I’m really glad you brought me here.”
“For me there’s a sort of déjà vu feel to it.”
“I’m the world’s biggest fan of the déjà vu,” I said. “I’ve kept a list of them, at least the ones since I was in the hospital when I was twelve. They don’t seem to make any sense at all, but I’m hoping that someday they will. Usually it’s trivial stuff. I’m doing my homework and the lead breaks on my pencil. Wham. Déjà vu. I’m sitting down to toast at breakfast, open up a jar of raspberry jelly, and there it is again. You don’t think it’s one big, long, repetitive loop we live over and over and these are just snippets of things that sneak through into our current memory?”
“Where