A new morning. She sat in bed furiously writing her most recent memory. It was short. Unremarkable. After a while of re-reading her scribbles, she got out of bed and wandered downstairs.
Alexia walked into the kitchen downstairs and found Leland sitting with furrowed brows at the large oak table. Sun glinted off the shimmery wallpaper on the far wall. Long beams of light stretched across the cold, slate tile under her bare feet.
“Morning.” Alexia crossed to the fridge, pulling out the milk.
Leland looked up as if she’d startled him. “Oh, hey. How’d you sleep?”
He looked exhausted. Dark circles rimmed his eyes and his usually perfect hair was smashed down in sickly, sloppy ringlets.
“Umm, better than you, I guess.” He looked as if he was having trouble holding his head upright. “You want some coffee?”
He just smiled.
“What’s the matter with you?” Alexia asked.
“Oh, nothing.” He stifled a yawn.
“No.” Alexia hit the button on the coffee pot. “It’s something.”
Leland sighed. “When you’re so close and you travel to lives we were in, you pull me with you. It just,” Leland dropped his hand from under his chin to the table, “keeps me up.”
“What? Shit, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“How could you?” He smiled a weak smile. “If you feel truly sorry, bring some toast with you.”
There were about a hundred things Alexia wanted to ask, but when she opened her mouth, the least important thing she could think of came out. “Why do I sleep? Or need food? I mean, I am dead, right? This shouldn’t matter anymore. You shouldn’t be so tired.”
“Alexia, we still eat and sleep because we are still in your Ether and you designed it based on your human life, where you slept and ate regularly. We do as this realm is designed.” He looked longingly toward the coffee pot. Alexia grabbed it and filled two mugs. She sat them down before returning to the fridge for creamer. She poured the cream into her dark coffee and plopped back into her seat.
“Yeah?” Alexia ran her finger across the lip of her mug. “So, if I had created that zombie world I asked you about before and all we could eat was synthesized grass and sunbeams, you would have to also?”
He actually laughed out loud. “Yes. We’d have to run from your zombies and eat sunbeams. This is better.”
“So, the place we go after this, the sit-whatever.”
“Cetteri,” Leland corrected.
He reached for a piece of toast. Alexia felt electricity shoot up her arm where he brushed her skin.
She nodded. “Yeah. There. It’s just full of people’s souls?” She tapped her mug. “I have to say, I never really believed all that Heaven and Hell stuff.”
“This is not Heaven and Hell stuff. Just another world,” he said. “We aren’t souls exactly like any mythology explains them. We’re Essences. We live, we make choices. We love. It isn’t an end. It isn’t a beginning. It is just a different way of existing than being human.” He took a long drink of coffee and Alexia watched his mouth.
“Okay. So, I don’t just continue my existence as Alexia once my human life ends? Who am I now?”
“You are you. Every you that has ever existed. Each life teaches us something and we change. If we stay in the Cetteri, it shapes us. It’s living, just a different way.”
“Essences aren’t human?” Alexia rubbed her eyes.
“Essences can become human, and sometimes we act human. We can look human. But no, we are something different. Every creature has an Essence. All the birds, all the fish, they are all made of the same energy we are.”
“Can humans exist without Essences?”
He shook his head lightly. “Being human is still being an Essence. It is simply a different form of being. A different world with different rules.”
“Okay,” Alexia said.
Leland brushed her hand while reaching across the table for the sugar and she felt a rush of heat and the room swam around her. Her vision blurred and when it refocused, everything was different.
Leland and the room were gone. Alexia was watching a woman, probably in her twenties. She recognized the woman as her past-self. Jarringly, she lurched inside the woman and instead of watching her, she was able to hear her thoughts and all her memories, though she couldn’t act. The woman was Abigail Turner and she was in control.
She was glad the witch trials were slowing, but other places had come to their senses faster than Massachusetts.
Her little sister sat among the other accused. Dirty clothes, dirty hair, pale skin. Charity was no witch. She was only a widowed, pregnant, seventeen-year-old who had lost her chubby cheeks and youthful glow during her imprisonment.
Abigail looked at the girl and Alexia could feel her sorrow. Charity was sweet and quiet, and Abigail didn’t want to lose her. It only took a moment to see that Charity was a past life of Cali.
Warm tears flowed down Abigail’s face as she focused on Charity’s belly, jutting out with the baby due any moment. It was all so different than the world Alexia lived in. Like a living storybook, she only knew what had happened up to that point. She could visualize the plot of land she lived on with her husband, now sitting next to her.
Abigail coughed and when she pulled her hand away, she saw that it was spotted with blood. Alexia felt the alarm in Abigail’s mind. It had been that way for weeks and getting worse. Closing her hand into a fist, she tucked it in her skirt before her husband or sister noticed. She was only twenty, but she wasn’t sure she would live to see Charity’s baby. Her own young children would be without a mother soon.
Lucky the Superior Court of Judicature had convened in Ipswich which was only a short distance from Abigail’s home. There had been several grand juries already trying other women and their charges had been dismissed. The hysteria is dying down. She could hear Abigail telling herself the facts over and over. Charity would go home, she thought.
Her husband squeezed her hand. She was glad for his support.
The bones in Charity’s cheeks stretched her ashen skin.
The family waited while the magistrate made his decisions and handed down each accused woman’s fate.
The door at the rear of the building slammed open as the magistrate spoke. A gust of yellow wind rushed down the aisle. No one noticed. Not even Abigail.
But Alexia did.
Abigail heard the magistrate speak—“Charity Bachman, the charges against you have been dismissed,”—and, overjoyed, Abigail turned to kiss her husband. Alexia saw him for the first time. He was a tall man in his forties; he had tanned skin along with defined muscles from working in the fields. Light blue eyes stared back at her; his lips curled up into a smile. He laughed with tears in his eyes. He was clean-shaven with glasses and dark curly hair.
It was Leland, but with glasses. She’d expected that it would be, but she hadn’t expected it to look like him. The only difference was the dark scar down his face. He squeezed her hand, clearly excited about Charity’s freedom. Alexia wanted to study him, but Abigail was controlling her.
“Thank the Lord,” he whispered in Abigail’s ear.
Time rushed past in an instant. The memories of the rest of Abigail’s life flew at her.
There wasn’t much life left, and it wasn’t the consumption that took her. A month after Charity’s trial, the house burned down, and she died. The edges of the memory were tinted yellow as her death approached. Fire licked painfully at Abigail as Alexia was drawn out of her.
The whole family had died that night.
Jolting in her seat at the kitchen table, Alexia almost fell out of her chair. Her stomach lurched like she was riding a roller coaster. It took a minute before Alexia could speak.
“I had seen part of that life before, but not enough to know what it was.” She paused as the last of the memories came before tilting her head at Leland. “We were married.” Alexia broke eye contact, trying to fight the emotions threatening to overt
ake her.
Leland took her chin in his hand and pulled her face up to his, tracing the flush along her cheek. His eyes searched hers, but she wasn’t sure what he was looking for or what he found there. “What else do you remember?” He asked after a while, dropping his hand from her face.
“Cali was—” Alexia closed her eyes, trying to straighten her thoughts. “We were sisters. Cali...or well, her name was Charity, I guess, she was on trial. For witchcraft? The Salem Witch Trials?”
“We didn’t live in Salem, but yes. Same time, same madness.” Leland’s face darkened as he spoke. “We were farmers.”
“There was a fire. We all died. It was right after the trial. Just like that,” Alexia took Leland’s hands. “We all died.” Alexia’s stomach tightened. “I was sick, but that wasn’t what killed me. Cali, or Charity, escaped persecution only to die a few weeks later. Like it was all for nothing.”
“Sometimes things like that happen,” Leland said.
“I guess.” Alexia didn’t sound convinced. Something bothered her but she wasn’t sure what. “How long ago did we meet?” she asked, changing the subject.
Leland’s eyes sparkled as he watched her. “We met hundreds of years ago. Thousands, actually.”
“Thousands? We met thousands of years ago?” Alexia asked.
Leland nodded.
“I’m thousands of years old?”
He laughed. “You’re older than me. You lived six lives before I even existed.”
“When was your first?”
“2050 BC. In England. With you.” He wrapped his hand around hers.
“You’ve lived every life with me?”
He nodded and squeezed her hand.
“Were we always...” Alexia’s eyes darted around the room feeling anxious. “In love?”
“Yes.” His voice was strong and sure.
Alexia paused for a beat. “Are we fated to always be in love?”
“No, Alexia. There’s no such thing as fate. We’re just two Essences who find each other and love each other. Always. But not because of fate.”
No matter what she felt, without her memories, he would always know more. It would never be a fling to him. According to Leland, once they got together, they stayed together. He wasn’t just some hot guy Alexia could fool around with and get to know. There were strings. It wasn’t fair.
“I’m tired. I think I need some time to figure some stuff out.”
“Of course. Anything you need,” Leland said.
Alexia went up to her room. She’d spent the morning in Abigail’s life. Her mind moved a mile a minute as she journaled the life.
She yawned. Reliving the past was exhausting. If remembering her past was her ticket out of her Ether, she wondered how long it would take to remember thousands of years. So far, the lives just confused her more.
After an hour alone, she crawled into bed. She didn’t remember falling asleep, but soon she was dreaming about a life where she had no name.
Alexia’s past-self was down in the muddy waterhole gathering the cleanest water she could while trying to cool herself. The sun beat down on her from directly overhead.
Memories and thoughts of the nameless girl flowed into Alexia’s brain from a time several thousand years before Alexia was born.
The seasons were dramatic, and the tribe moved frequently to avoid the snow or chase food. It had been a crisp morning, but the sun had dried up all hints of the cool morning dew. The water she stood in was refreshing. The warm season didn’t last long and her past-self loved to soak up the sun.
The water had the added advantage of putting distance between her and the tribe’s leader. He kept them safe, but he was not usually kind. He had his moments, though—something her mother reminded her of often. Alexia felt the girl’s mixed emotions about the man.
“He saved your life,” her mother would say when the girl would complain about him.
She’d been found alone at about two years old. No one knew where she’d come from or why. She hadn’t known her name and the leader had demanded she stay nameless so that she “knew her place” as no one important. The leader had taken mercy on her and allowed her to live and be raised by the tribe. She’d become the ward of a woman who’d lost her children and loved her as her own.
She heard a familiar call from not far off. It sounded like a strange bird and her stomach flipped with excitement. The girl wondered, not for the first time, if her mother would figure out that she made a reason to wander off every time that strange sound was heard. If she had guessed, she said nothing.
“I’m going to check over here for anything useful,” she lied before scurrying away toward the outcropping where he waited.
He called her Dear One and whispered how much he loved her as his hand ran up her thigh. His name meant light. The language they used was hard sounding and strange to Alexia’s ears. The angry words clicked as they rolled off her tongue, but at the same time, were oddly musical. There was no form of writing, so Alexia was sure this language had been lost to the ages.
The boy standing in front of her was about a year older than her and she’d been drawn to him the entire fourteen years she’d had with the tribe. He had long limbs that he hadn’t quite grown into and long, thick hair. His legs were lean and though he was skinny, he was strong. Though the boy looked nothing like Leland, Alexia knew it was his past life.
She pulled off the animal skins covering her, not caring that if caught, she would take the blame. She’d loved him for years, but their relationship hadn’t been physical for long. Alexia could still feel the girl’s nerves. The water she’d been standing in glistened on her naked body. He pulled her to him and his mouth danced from her mouth, down to her chin, her neck, down her shoulders, and arm. He kissed each of her fingertips on the hand he held in his. She radiated heat where he touched her.
They kissed as they lay in the warm sun and when their naked bodies connected, the girl knew she’d never felt anything so powerful, that maybe no one had ever loved as deeply as they did in that moment. Alexia felt the rush of the girl’s emotions and almost got lost in them. Sex in the sun by the water was the most they could hope for in their lives.
“You know I love you.” He ran his fingers across her lips.
She smiled, but it felt brittle to her. “Until he figures us out.”
“I’ll do anything for you. Anything you need,” he said.
Her mother calling from the distance made her jump. She pulled on her filthy animal skins, still dripping with water, while he dressed in fine clothing. His had been made by one of his servants. It was dyed in patterns with blues and reds that mixed where they met. His importance to the tribe as the son of the leader was clear in his beautiful clothing.
She started to walk away, but before she left, he grabbed her arm.
“We will make this work.” His voice swirled around her as her surroundings fell away.
“How?” Her question echoed around her.
She woke as the rest of the life rushed at her. They had made it work. Leland’s past-self had broken away from the main group and had wandered far from his father’s land. A small group settled at the river and built a community. They stopped roaming and erected a monument where they settled. Two stones were placed, parallel to each other standing from the ground. Another large stone was straddled across the top of the two stones, making them look like giant stone doorways. A circle was created with several of these triple stone structures. The rock turned almost blue in the rain, and the people used it as a site to honor the land, the sky, and their dead. He had kept his word and found a way for them to be together.
She jotted the details in her journal and knew that had been her first life with Leland. It hadn’t been her first life, but it had been theirs. She was certain.
Life after life ran through her dreams as she slept. It was the same each time. Her mind simply plopped into the skull of her past-self, right beside the brain that belonged there. Alexia watched the wor
ld through someone else’s eyes and all she knew was what that brain thought about. She was dropped into a random moment in time and lived in the past, even if only briefly.
When she woke and started journaling, the complete memory of the lives returned to her. She remembered her childhoods and falling in love. She remembered each death.
In the dreams, her past self rarely thought about the time or place, but Alexia knew once she woke. The languages were easy to understand while her past spoke them, but in some of her old lives, the languages had died out so long ago that they didn’t even have names anymore. Only the dead remembered them now.
It was her third morning in the house. She’d detailed ten lives.
Chapter Thirteen
The hard, wooden bench under Cali shone with its recent polish. The tall room was lined with stained glass windows and beautiful colors streamed in with the sunlight. She admired everything around her and wondered why there were so many quiet people sitting in the giant space.
She stood and approached the front. No one noticed her. Ragged and torn wood jutted out from a hole in the top of the muddy coffin. Dirt clung to the cracks and she could smell the musty, rotten air. She couldn’t bring herself to look inside. Instead, she looked over to the picture of Lexi smiling at her from the oversized frame. The picture from Lexi’s funeral.
Stumbling backward, Cali tripped. As she spilled across the floor, she noticed she wore the gray dress she’d worn to the funeral. She looked to the pews—still no one noticed her. They all wept silently for Lexi.
“No. This isn’t happening.” She moved toward the doors and at the same time, everyone else stood and started toward them. She was washed outside on a current of crying people who didn’t look twice at her. She pulled away once free from the confines of the building. Outside, the bright sun blinded her and once she could see again, the people had vanished and she stood on a sidewalk that led straight ahead of her as far as she could see. Next to her was Tom’s Diner. The front doors were chained shut and most of the windows were boarded up. The sun glinted off the broken windows.
Last Time She Died Page 12