ONCE UPON ANOTHER TIME

by McQuestion, Rosary

  A devilish grin crossed Laura’s lips. “It was kind of funny,” she sniffled, “that David had to go to the hospital to get a tetanus shot for the bite his wife took out of his leg.”

  “It was,” I said with a laugh. “And it was so Thelma-and-Louise-like when we took off in his wife’s Porsche, while flames practically shot up from the rear tires.”

  “Even better,” Laura said, getting the giggles. “How about when we were sitting on the bench in central booking and that tattooed female prisoner flirted with you? And you told her that bogus story about missing your dose of anti-psychotic meds, and literally growled at her. I was waiting for you to foam at the mouth,” Laura said, as she leaned against the desk, laughing herself silly.

  “No, no, the best one was when they put us in lockdown with those women who called us ‘white homeys,’ and you strutted around in your designer clothes, trying to act all tough and in control. Little did you know, the dried up puddles of mascara under your eyes and black streaks down both sides of your face had you looking like ‘Ozzy Osbourne, the younger years,’” I said, while laughing so hard, I felt as if I was about to pee myself.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” Laura said, jumping up and down and flapping her hands like an overactive child who had missed her daily dose of Ritalin. “But did you catch the death ray look in David’s wife’s eyes when I told her I was appalled at David’s actions and disgusted that he had the gall to bring me to their penthouse? And she asked, ‘What penthouse?’”

  We’d both dissolved into a wave of giggles as we bantered on about our adventures in the Big House. For the first time in many years, I had found Laura leaning on me to help her through her heartache. Maybe now I could begin to feel worthy of her friendship.

  Twenty-five

  I gazed down at Gavin lying in my bed all rumpled and warm from our long love making session, while making circles on his glistening chest with my index finger. He lifted a hand and combed back a thick wave of hair that fell over one side of my face, while looking up at me with smoldering Superman good looks and black sooty lashes over half-opened crystal blue eyes. “Come here,” he said, as he put his hand on the back of my head and pulled me down until my lips met with his.

  While we kissed, I thought about our lovemaking. Never had I drawn comparisons between men, few as that may have been. However, with every touch of Gavin’s hand, every word he whispered in my ear, his actions, and his body fitting perfectly with mine, was like reliving my life with Matt. The similarities were incredible, yet they were uniquely different. Like biting into an apple and tasting the sweet citrus of an orange. Matt and Gavin had somehow felt interchangeable in my mind.

  “I think you've bewitched me,” Gavin whispered, as I rolled off his muscular, tanned body to lie next to him. The sheets felt moist against my naked skin, as I tucked a silky blue feather-stuffed throw pillow under my head.

  “That was part of my evil plan all along,” I said softly, as I lightly ran the tips of my fingers over his glistening triceps and then gave him a kiss and slipped out from under his arms.

  “Not so fast.” He pulled me back to bed, and rested his head on my chest.

  “It’s 7:00,” I said, as I took his face in my hands and lifted his head off my chest. His 5:00 shadow felt coarse against my palms. “Don’t you want supper?”

  “No, I want you.” His breath felt warm as he snuggled his face into my neck.

  “Okay, but I’m warning you. I haven’t eaten since this morning and if I don’t get some food in me quickly, I could pass out. It’d be like making love to a cadaver.”

  He raised his head and stared into my eyes, as if he were searching for an answer to a question never asked. His lips curled up slowly, as he rolled over onto his back and pulled me on top of him. “Okay, we’ll have supper, but before we do I want to tell you something.” He cupped my hand in his and placed it over his heart, while I studied the dimple in his chin, his strong Roman nose, and full lips. “You bring out feelings in me I never knew existed. Yet, it’s a familiar feeling, like we’d always been together.”

  Those words added fuel to the fire of thoughts that by some miracle in the universe there was a connection between the only two men I’d ever loved.

  “Yes, I know. I feel the same way.”

  “My dear, sweet chaton, it’s hard to put into words how I feel about you. At work, I become distracted thinking about you. I find myself doing silly things like scribbling down words, thoughts, phrases that describe how you make me feel. But it seems impossible, like using a nail file to chisel a figure out of a mountain of rock. You’re like an unwritten poem waiting to surface in my head. But tonight as we made love, the words came to me. Whether it’s poetic, I can’t say.” He paused. “You want to hear it?”

  “Of course,” I said, my heart practically skipping a beat. I was constantly amazed at Gavin’s unassuming romantic nature.

  He gently tucked a lock of my hair behind my ear. “Aubrey McCory,” he said softly. “On the day I met you, it was as if my soul blinked back a final tear, and when my heart opened to take in the moment, I looked into your eyes and finally knew the meaning of forever.”

  My breath caught in my chest, and I felt as if I was about to suffocate. I quickly rolled over and sat straight up in bed. For years, I’d reread the poems Matt had written to me--the poems I’d kept hidden in a shoebox in my closet. I memorized each line, and felt the emotion behind each word. That evening, I tried to make sense of how Gavin could have recited a line from the very first poem Matt had ever written to me.

  Gavin sat up and rubbed my back in a circular motion. “Aubrey is something wrong?”

  I looked over my shoulder at him. My pulse pounded in my temples, my arms felt prickly and heavy. “I don’t believe this. You found my box of poems.” I was barely able to speak the words. I felt betrayed, confused. Moments before everything made sense, and two heartbeats later, it had all changed.

  “What are you talking about? Are you feeling all right?”

  Gavin’s pretense was more than irritating. I slid my legs over the side of the bed, my bare feet planted firmly on the hardwood floor. Hastily I reached for my robe. Yanking it out from under him, I practically toppled him off the bed. I was unable to comprehend that he had snooped in my closet and uncovered something so personal.

  I was suddenly aware of Gavin sitting next to me on the bed, his arm around my shoulder. “Chaton, you’re trembling. You really do need something to eat, don’t you?”

  “Stop calling me chaton!” I glared at him through tear-blurred eyes.

  He scratched his head, while his gaze traveled across the floor. “You didn’t like the poem?”

  “Gavin Donnelly, don’t even think you’re going to pretend to not know why I’m so upset!” I brushed away a tear from my cheek with the back of my hand.

  Gavin paused. “I don’t understand what I’ve done wrong.”

  “How could you pretend to have made that poem up in your head?”

  I got up from the bed, walked over to the window and stared toward the sun as it dropped from the sky in a blaze of orange. Anger and hurt was all I could feel as I spun around to face Gavin.

  “I trusted you,” I said as I jabbed a finger in the air. “How could you have gone through my personal things? How could you have taken credit for words that were written by someone else?” I began to pace as if trying to out-walk the terrible feeling of deceit that followed me.

  “You read the letters I’d written to Matt after he’d died. Didn’t you?” I stopped and turned to face Gavin. His shoulders slumped forward and his forehead furrowed like the skin of a Sharpe, when suddenly his eyes went wide as he looked up at me. “You wrote letters to your dead husband? Now I’m really confused,” he muttered.

  “Confused? I’m the one who’s frigging confused!” I stared at him with arms folded, while my bare foot tapped the floor. He gazed up at me with the-lights-are-on-but-nobody’s-home look in his eyes. A sick, sinking feeling crept i
nto the pit of my stomach. I knew Gavin well enough to know he wasn’t faking that blank look on his face.

  The room suddenly took on a great silence. From somewhere in the house I heard a clock ticking. I panicked and tried to hammer out some sense of what had just happened. However, as sure as the waves belonged to the ocean, and the sun belonged to the sky, I felt I’d belonged locked up in an institution.

  At times, I’d felt as if I were in some movie and central casting chose me for the lead part, but I didn’t have a clue as to what the storyline was. It was too late when I’d figured out that Gavin must have pulled another memory from the past. Or was it Matt? I sighed and sunk wearily onto the foot of the bed, while making an indistinct coughing sound and smoothing out some lumps in the duvet cover. I was surprised Gavin hadn’t bolted from the room.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, in a voice that sounded borrowed. “Now that I’ve regained some semblance of normality, it’s obvious you don’t have a clue as to what I’m rambling on about, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.” Gavin’s face took on a serious look.

  “Okay, before I tell you what’s going on, let’s make a pact.”

  “A pact?”

  “Yes, a pact.” I took a deep breath and focused straight ahead at the pink ballerina snow globe that sat on top of my dresser, a Christmas gift from Nicholas. Normally I would have said no to Nicholas sleeping at my parents’ house on a school night, but I felt Gavin and I needed some alone time. Mother must have thought the same.

  “If I tell you what this is all about, you have to promise you won’t think I’m crazy and run out on me.” I nervously twirled a lock of hair between my fingers, knowing honesty was the best policy. I knew I’d have to tell him everything, well, maybe not everything. I certainly wasn’t going to admit to communicating with Matt’s spirit or that I’d inherited psychic powers from my Aunt Millie who wound up falling off the Brooklyn Bridge. Nor could I mention anything about Mother Paula.

  Gavin slid over to sit next to me. “I promise,” he said softly.

  I explained my devastation of Matt dying while I was pregnant, and that for years I’d felt it’d been my fault that he died and that was how I’d begun writing letters to him. I explained how Matt wrote me love poems and when I told Gavin I thought he’d stolen a line from one of Matt’s poems, he looked shell-shocked.

  “How could you think that? I’d never go snooping in your closet.”

  “I know that now, it’s just that it’d been the exact words Matt had written. How can that be explained?”

  Gavin looked puzzled. “I don’t even write poetry.”

  I couldn’t very well blurt out that I felt Matt might have played a part in it all. That would have been insane. Nothing made sense.

  “Remember the night we’d gone on the gondola ride and you had a memory of being on a sailboat you knew nothing about? You’d also said you’d felt as if I were a memory from your past.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You told me those feelings of having memories had happened several times over the years. Do you recall exactly when or how it started?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly, but it was close to the time when I’d lost my mother and my fiancée, their deaths two months apart. I didn’t know where my father was living. I felt alone, depressed, and didn’t see much meaning to life.”

  A deep sadness crept into my heart, as I recalled being in that same frame of mind after Matt died.

  “My buddy and I went out to celebrate his birthday. We pulled an all-nighter and ended up at some house party. We left around five in the morning and headed home on our motorcycles. It was foggy; the roads were slick. We didn’t get but three miles down the road, when a car plowed right into me.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “I don’t remember much other than lots of commotion going on, things were blurred, voices sounded far away, then everything went black. Next time I opened my eyes was to bright lights, people scrambling. I figured I was in the ER; an oxygen mask covered my mouth. It was hard to breathe. I thought I was going to die. It was somewhere around the time of my accident that I’d felt like I was having these weird memories. That’s all I recall.”

  “Wait a minute, back up. Why hadn’t you ever told me this?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t seem to matter.”

  “Well, finish telling me what happened after they’d gotten you to the hospital.”

  “I was in recovery for about six weeks.”

  “Yeah, but you didn’t finish telling me why you thought you were going to die. Were you critically injured?”

  “I was pretty banged up, but the reason I thought I was going to die had to do with the ER being full and me having to be out in a hallway. I’d later found out there’d been an apartment building fire in the middle of the night, several people had been injured, some died in that same ER. The only space left was the hallway. It was scary.”

  “I’m so sorry. How long was it before they got you into a room?”

  “I don’t know. I’d lost my sense of time. It could have been mere minutes, but feeling like someone was standing on my chest made it seem like hours. I was trying to fight so I wouldn’t lose consciousness, when the hospital attendants had parked a guy on a gurney just inches from me. We were face to face. He was bloody, I probably wasn’t any better. Past his oxygen mask, I saw the scared look in his eyes. I didn’t have the strength to turn my head away. He reached up, grabbed my wrist. Then his hand fell away and his eyes closed. That was the last thing I remembered before waking up after having had surgery. I’d broken eight ribs and shattered the bones in my left leg. The doc put pins in to hold it together.”

  “So, no more motorcycles?”

  “Yeah, I still rode after that. Just like getting kicked off a horse. You have to get right back on.”

  “Hmm, so that’s when you started having these memory things happen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you remember if it was before or after your accident?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m thinking after only because the accident changed my life. During my recovery, I asked about the guy who’d been on the gurney next to me. They told me he died. I had wondered if it was when I saw his eyes close. I don’t know if it was because I’d seen someone die right before my eyes, but I literally felt an immediate change inside me. I can’t explain it other than I felt very different. My mind had somehow shifted into another gear. There I was feeling terrible for this young guy who died, but I’d felt better about myself. It sounds ridiculous, but I never felt like my old self after that.”

  “Because you were thankful to be alive?”

  “Well, yeah I was thankful, but that’s not what I meant. I was actually like another person who didn’t even think like Gavin Donnelly. All the years of resentment toward my father for not being there for me just vanished. Not long after that, I searched for him. I wanted to forgive him for running out on my mom and me. I wanted to be close to him, to have him in my life, to take care of him if I had to.”

  Gavin’s gaze crossed the room, with a pensive look in his eyes. I rested my head on his shoulder, my arm around his waist.

  “Yeah,” Gavin sighed. “South County Hospital in Wakefield is where my life took a detour--but a good detour.”

  I winced, while thinking that was the hospital the coast guard helicopter had flown Matt to, as it was closest to Block Island. Lifting my head off Gavin’s shoulder, I looked at him in astonishment. “How many years ago did this happen?” My heart thumped hard against my chest.

  “Let me see,” Gavin said, as his eyes scanned upward. “Hmm, this past July fifteenth, it’d been seven years. I’ll never forget the date because it was the day after my buddy’s birthday. I even remember it was around eight in the morning and the guy who died had on a jogging suit.”

  I gasped for air, but my lungs felt too clogged to fill up. Matt had died on that exact date, at around that same time, at that very hospital seven
years before, while wearing his jogging suit. I grabbed onto the front of my robe, as if it were a life raft to help me from drowning in my sea of thoughts. My recollection of Matt’s theory was forefront in my mind. He’d believed that somehow a person would be able to transport their spirit into the body of a living person nearest to them at the time of their death.

  Suddenly it all made sense, not that it was a theory that had ever been proven, but it was Matt’s theory. That was why reincarnation didn’t make sense, but it was the reason I’d dreamt that Gavin was Matt, and Mother Paula had said the same…

  “I need some aspirin--quick!” I said, while trying not to pass out.

  “You got a headache?”

  “No, but I’ve heard it prevents heart attacks.”

  My pulse raced; my head swam. My mind spun like a magnetic sphere picking up thoughts of Gavin’s quirky Matt-like mannerisms, how he could read my moods, how he called me chaton, his lovemaking, knowing the name of Matt’s boat, and the million other familiar things about him. I got up from the bed, took a step forward, and the whole room turned upside down.

  * * * *

  “Aubrey?” A blurry, wobbly figure hovered over me.

  “Chaton it’s me,” the figure said.

  “Matt, is that you?” I mumbled.

  “Aubrey, I can’t understand what you’re saying? You fainted.”

  My sight came back into focus.

  “I caught you before you hit the floor.” Gavin smiled, his strong arm held up the top half of my body. “I guess you weren’t joking about needing some food. I’ll run downstairs and get you some orange juice and crackers so you don’t pass out again.”

  He helped me to bed and dashed downstairs.

  I sat on the edge of the bed, still lightheaded. The ballerina inside the snow globe on my dresser stared back at me relentlessly as if to say--so what are you going to do now?

  Twenty-six

  “Objection, Your Honor, counsel is leading the witness,” I said.