“I wonder what they’re making of me,” she said. “Not only should I be dead, that’s bad enough. I should be seventeen years older than I am. I’m probably freaking them all out.”
“Maybe they think you’re a clone,” I said. “There are simpler explanations than—”
“Than the truth?” She turned on her side and looked at me; her strawberry blond hair fell across her face. “And what about you? Is the truth freaking you out, too, Michael?”
“What truth?” She had no answer.
“I don’t know how I feel,” I said. “I feel like I’m waking up. You know? That it’s just sinking in.”
“I know. I don’t know what to say. We’ll just have to give it time.” Her voice had that light lilt that was a legacy of her childhood, and her tone just the right frisson of humor. She was just as I remembered her, and more; she had even brought back things I had forgotten about her, things that had once been so precious.
For seventeen years I had been storing up all I had longed to say to her, all I had longed to tell her I felt, after I thought I’d lost the opportunity for good. But somehow, with her there beside me, none of that stuff mattered. It was as if the intervening seventeen years had never existed. I was taken back to the immediacy of her death, how I had felt in the first days and weeks, and the wound was as raw as it had ever been. It made no sense, emotionally. But then the situation we were in made no sense. My heart wasn’t programmed for this, I thought.
Morag was watching me. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said.
That made me laugh. “I’ve been through a lot… You know, I think the doctors’ tests have started to make it more real for me. I mean, ghosts don’t have DNA, do they?”
“I’m not a ghost,” she said faintly.
“OK. But I think you’ve been haunting me all my life.”
“All your life?” She sounded genuinely puzzled.
“Since I was a kid.” I’d never told her this before she had died. Now, though, I hesitantly ran through the strange story for her.
She blew out her cheeks. “On any other day that would be a hell of a story.”
“Do you remember any of this? Like those times on the beach, when I was nine or ten—”
She said, frowning, “I feel like there are gaps. I don’t know, Michael.”
I asked her the basic question bluntly. “How did you get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why has it happened? Why are you here?”
She had nothing to say.
I propped myself on one elbow and looked at her. Now that I had started asking questions, more occurred, as if my brain was starting to work again. “Why should you be the age you are?” As far as I could tell from what the doctor had hinted, she was precisely the age she had been on the day of her death.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just is.”
“And how come you weren’t fazed to find out what date it is — seventeen years in your future?” I rubbed my own jowly jaw. “How come you weren’t horrified to find I’d turned into the oldest man in the universe?”
“I just seemed to know where I was. When I was. The way you know such things anyhow, without thinking about it.”
“But that must mean you were set up, somehow. Prepared for your return.”
“Rebooted? Is that the word you’re looking for?” There was fear in her voice, doubt, but there was an edge of humor, too. “You were always such a tech-head, Michael. Believe me, I want to know, too. But I think you’re just skirting around the big questions.” She shook her head. “Seventeen years and you haven’t changed a bit.”
She was right. Only a couple of hours after her reincarnation, metaphysics just didn’t matter. I sat up, swinging my legs over the edge of my bed, and faced her. “All right, let’s get to it. There’s no sign of the pregnancy, is there? Or of the labor, the birth?”
“So that doctor said.”
“But you remember it all.”
She frowned. “I went into labor too early. It hurt like hell. You rushed me to hospital, in the car.” I remembered; what a ride that was. “I was taken in for a C-section. I was drugged to the eyeballs, but the pain — I knew something was going wrong—” Suddenly she was weeping, even as she spoke; her shoulders shook, and she wiped angrily at her eyes. “Damn it, Michael, for me this only just happened.”
My heart was being ripped apart. I longed to hold her, to comfort her. But a spasm of anger stopped me. “What else happened in between? A white light, a guy with a beard and a big book at a pearly gate—”
“I don’t know.” She hid her eyes with her arm, a gesture I suddenly remembered so well. “Something… I can’t say. It’s not even like a memory. I didn’t ask for any of this, Michael.” Then she lowered her arm and faced me. “Just as I didn’t ask to have a relationship with John. You must know about that by now.”
“How do you expect me to feel about that?”
“It just happened,”she said. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. You were away so much… John and I worked together a lot. We just sort of fell into it. And then the pregnancy.”
She had chosen not to terminate, she told me, even though the baby was obviously John’s, even though she knew how much hurt it would cause everybody — and even though the doctors had advised her to abort for the sake of her own health, I learned now — she couldn’t bear to lose it.
“So you let me think it was mine.”
“We didn’t know how to handle it. John and me. We didn’t know what to do for the best.”
“Did you love him?”
“Yes,” she said bravely. “But I loved you more, Michael. I always did. So did John. Neither of us wanted to hurt you. And then there was Tom to think about. I never planned to leave you, you know, to go to John. Our relationship was just a, a thing, and then we got caught out there. We didn’t know what to do. I’m not expecting you to sympathize, Michael, but we were both in a hell of a state.”
It was hard to imagine John, my competent older brother, having got himself into such a mess.
“We put off telling you,” she said. “We decided I’d wait until I had the baby — as much as we decided anything. Once it was born, once it existed—”
“He,” I said. “The baby was a boy.”
She took that in, and nodded carefully. “OK. Once he was there, it would all feel different. You remember how we were before Tom was born, frightened and elated all at the same time? But then once he was born things sort of clarified.”
“I remember.”
“So when the new baby came, when it was real, a person, we would see how we all felt. And then—”
“And then you’d tell me that this wonderful bundle of joy was not mine but my older brother’s?”
Anger flared in her eyes. “Is that all you think about, that it’s John’s child? If it had been some stranger’s, would you feel better?” She shook her head. “You’ve suddenly gotten so old your face looks like it’s melted. But you’re still a little kid inside, still competing with your brother…”
Maybe she was right. After all my fist still hurt from where I had punched John in the mouth. But I wanted to be careful not to think that way, not to go down that road, because I didn’t want to draw the conclusion, on any emotional level, that my brother had killed my wife. How could I live with such a thought in my head?
We seemed to run down. We sat there facing each other.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “We’ve only been together a couple of hours. You’ve been returned to me from the dead, for God’s sake, like fucking Lazarus. And we’re yelling in each other’s faces.”
“You started it,” she snapped back.
“No, I didn’t. You slept with my brother.”