Once Again

by Amy Durham

  Except that it might well affect me just as much as it affected him.

  I glanced over at him toward the end of Mrs. Chadwick’s lecture and noticed his hand clenching into a fist over and over again. Clearly he was as agitated as I was.

  Good.

  I wasn’t exactly mad at him. Frustrated was a better word.

  And yes, my feelings were hurt. But I wouldn’t let him see that. I shoved it all inside, locking my disappointment away and refusing to let it show on my face. When the bell rang to end class, I put on a neutral expression and left the room.

  As we walked toward my U.S. History class, he filled me in a bit more.

  “Thanks to Patsy, I knew what to look for,” he explained. “Once I had the name Leo Emerson, it wasn’t hard to find his name and the name of his wife.”

  “And what did you discover about them?”

  “They owned the house in the mid 1800s. There’s no record of children, and no date of death listed. When the house was abandoned, it went to his brother. Which was how it eventually ended up being William and Patsy’s.”

  “So, are we now operating under the assumption that one of my birth parents was somehow related to Lillian Bostridge?”

  “I think that’s what we’ve got to assume at this point.” We stopped just short of my classroom door, leaned against the wall out of the way of the traffic. “We know I’m connected to the Emerson’s. The logical partner to that is that you’re connected to Lillian’s family. Even if you never find out who your birth parents are, I figure it’s a safe bet one of them is descended the Bostridges. And you coming here to Sky Cove must be one of the two intersecting events that caused the reincarnation visions to really amp up.”

  I nodded. It made sense, as much as anything in this whole mess could make sense. “And we still have no idea what the second event could be.”

  Luke shook his head. “Maybe we should talk to Brooke McKenna. We know she’s connected to the Emersons, that she has some kind of knowledge of the tragic story that happened to Leo and Lillian.”

  “And she works in Boston. As a labor delivery nurse.” I lowered my voice as two cheerleaders, Jade and Kristin, walked into the room. Though they’d actually been okay and given me no indication of taking part in Kara’s bad attitude, I wasn’t willing to risk them overhearing me.

  “But she didn’t work there when you were born.” Luke shifted closer to me. “Patsy said she worked somewhere else until just a few years ago.”

  “It can’t be coincidence, Luke. Her job. The fact that she’s in Boston. It’s too much overlap to be insignificant.”

  “You’re right.” He looked at his cell, checking the time, and I knew he was going to have to head to his next class. “Can you come to the house this afternoon?”

  I nodded.

  “I’ll call you when I’m done with practice and swing by and pick you up. You can have dinner with Mom and me and we’ll figure out where we go from here. I have a few more theories we ought to talk about.”

  “So do I,” I said. “But you don’t have to pick me up. I can drive out, so you don’t have to drive back into town to take me home.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t want you out by yourself at night. Not with all this going on.”

  I started to protest, but he stopped me with a pleading look. “Let me do what I can to protect you.”

  And how could I argue with that?

  Just like that, my emotions were fully engaged again, and the pendulum that was my doubt about Luke’s feelings swung back to the side of believing they were genuine and real.

  If it was a delusion, I was buying it willingly.

  And probably regret it later.

  ***

  I called Adrienne that afternoon. I’d been woefully neglect in keeping in touch with my best friend in Nashville. Part of me felt guilty for making new friends in Sky Cove, but I supposed that was the natural way of things. And I was thankful for Jessie and Marsha and the other girls I’d met. It was good to be able to share the day-to-day happenings with them.

  But the prospect of hearing Adrienne’s voice somehow made the vortex of my crazy emotions seem less daunting.

  “Layla!” she squealed when she answered the call. “I miss you!”

  “Me too. How are things?”

  “Same as usual,” she said. “High school drama and all that goes with it.”

  I thought of Kara and the pictures on the lunch table. “Some things are the same wherever you are.”

  “Uh oh. What’s doing with the boy you told me about?”

  I wanted so badly to confide in her, but how could I possibly tell her what was going on without sounding like a total freak?

  “It’s just weird,” I began, deciding to just skim the surface. “We’re still together, I guess, but there are some things from the past that just keep creeping up and making me wonder.”

  “An ex-girlfriend,” Adrienne declared. “They so suck.”

  I laughed. It was true. Ex-girlfriends sucked.

  “Sort of,” I replied. “Anyway, I just keep having these doubts, like maybe he doesn’t really like me as much as he thinks he does. Like any minute now the new will wear off and everything’s going to just fall apart.”

  True enough, even though Luke’s ex-girlfriend was only a small part of the problem.

  “Layla, you’ve always had a self-confidence issue.”

  Really? I had? I mean, I’d always known I wasn’t cut out for “popular status”, but I’d also felt right at home in the middle of the pack. I was comfortable.

  “What makes you say that?” I asked, even as my doubts about Luke waved red flags in my face.

  “Oh, I know you don’t think you have any issues with your self-image, and in a lot of ways you don’t. You’re smart and you embrace that. You’re happy being who you are, and you don’t kill yourself trying to fit in with the popular crowds. All of that’s good. But I don’t think you’ve ever looked at yourself and thought of yourself as pretty or attractive. I think when it comes to guys, you’ve always just sort of wondered what they could possibly see in you.”

  She was right, I realized. She was absolutely right. Adrienne was pretty and thin and stylish, and I’d always just thought of myself as plain, inside and out. Hadn’t I been surprised by Luke’s interest in me?

  “Does your silence mean you think I’m right?” Adrienne asked.

  “I see your point,” I said. “I guess it’s because I never wanted it to matter what a guy thought of me.”

  Far less likely to get hurt that way.

  “But what Lucas thinks matters, doesn’t it?” she asked.

  Did it ever. “Yes, it does. Very much.”

  “Then trust him. If it falls apart, it falls apart. You won’t be the first person to experience that. But if you keep doubting, you might miss out on something great.”

  “I need your pep talks more often,” I said with a smile.

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m a regular teen shrink.”

  “You should come visit, maybe spend some of the summer here with me.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  When I hung up, I felt somewhat better. At the very least, I had a better understanding of where some of my doubts came from.

  Now if I could just have a better understanding about what craziness went on in the past and what Lucas and I were supposed to do about it in the present.

  CHAPTER 34

  Gwen wasn’t home when Luke and I arrived. A note on the kitchen table said she’d gone to the dentist and would be back in time for dinner.

  Luke headed upstairs to drop his backpack in his room and I followed. I pushed the door wide open as I stepped in, watching him stand at the window for a long moment.

  “Layla, I need to apologize again about the other night,” he said, when he finally spoke.

  I said nothing, my silence prompting him to turn and look at me.

  “For the way things got out of hand between us.”

  I did
n’t know what to say. I wasn’t sorry about it, especially since we’d both had the good sense to put the brakes on. And feeling the way I felt about him I didn’t have it in me to regret the way we’d clung to each other after the death dream.

  It bothered me that he was sorry.

  “I mean, I’m not sorry I kissed you like that,” he corrected. “I’m just sorry I pushed you that far.”

  Okay. So maybe he wasn’t sorry about the kissing. Maybe it wasn’t dislike or regret. Maybe he felt...

  “I feel guilty for manhandling you, and I wish you’d say something because I’m so incredibly sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize.” I stepped closer, though a good five feet remained between us. “You have nothing to be sorry for. You didn’t do anything. It was a reaction to what we saw in the dream. It was natural. And it was mutual.”

  “It’s just... I don’t know.” He shoved his hands through his hair and walked back toward the window. He took a deep breath, shoulders slumping and turned to look at me. “We’re in the middle of this insane situation, and I feel like I have to hold myself back and not feel what I’m feeling so we don’t cloud over things or piss off the bad guys, so we can keep our focus.”

  Where was he going with all this?

  “And I want you to know that I do think of you that way.” He walked closer, angled his head. “I mean, in that way.”

  My heart went wild, and I wondered if he could hear it. The look on his face melted everything inside me, turning my brain to mush.

  But he wasn’t finished.

  “Sometimes I look at you and I forget all about strange dreams and visions and past lives, and all I can think about is how pretty you look and how lucky I am and how proud I am that you want to be with me. Sometimes all I want is to be a normal eighteen year-old guy who’s crazy about his girlfriend.”

  Ohmigosh. Wow.

  And yet, at the same time my heart soared with elation, I wondered if he could be that normal eighteen year-old. I wondered if he could feel about me the way a guy felt about his girlfriend under regular circumstances.

  But for however long he wanted to, I’d oblige.

  “Do you think,” he began, moving to stand right in front of me, “that for a few minutes, we can just be Luke and Layla, happy to be together?”

  I nodded, knowing that I’d take any opportunity to make a memory with him. If the time came that memories were all I had, I aimed to have plenty.

  With hands so gentle and so soft, he framed my face, tracing his thumbs beneath my eyes with a kind reverence that stole my breath.

  I was undone.

  His lips lowered to mine and my eyes fluttered shut, just like I’d seen in the movies. A delicious swirling commenced in my stomach as I felt the press of his mouth. Somehow my arms wound their way around his neck, though I could not recall giving them the order. One of his hands slid to the small of my back and pulled my body flush against his.

  For several long moments we stood like that, in the middle of his room, lost in the kind of kisses I’d thought only happened in fantasies. Time seemed suspended, as if what had been and what was yet to come didn’t exist. There was no hurry, no urgency, no pressure for more than this. Just us, Luke and Layla, two kids who’d managed to find happiness in the midst of teen angst and drama.

  And for those moments, I could almost put my doubts aside. Almost.

  Gwen’s key in the front door broke the spell, but not before Luke pressed his forehead to mine and smiled.

  All I could do was smile back, so lost in love I would gladly drown.

  ***

  We settled once again at the kitchen table. It still amazed me that Luke, Gwen, and I could discuss the reincarnation issues over dinner without fear of indigestion or choking. It now seemed as normal as anything else, and I couldn’t decide whether that was good or bad.

  “So something weird happened at practice today,” Luke said.

  I paused and looked over at him.

  “We were running the trail down through the neighborhood where Emerson house is. I was running the old road that winds with the creek, and it was like all of a sudden I could’ve run as fast as I wanted to.”

  “You’ve always run fast, Luke,” Gwen said.

  “But I mean, I had to hold back. I was giving the run a hundred percent already, but all of a sudden I had more inside me, like I could’ve taken off and gone faster than a human should be able to. I had to force myself to run normal.”

  “Has that ever happened before?” I asked.

  “Once last week, but I just thought it was my mind playing tricks on me. But today...” He let his voice trail off.

  “It’s The Gifting,” I said, grabbing the book from the edge of the table and flipping it open to the pages I’d marked.

  Gwen took the book and read the passage out loud. Luke just stared, wide-eyed, like he couldn’t believe it.

  “So, you think I’ve been gifted with a supernatural ability?”

  “It’s not so hard to believe,” I said. “We’re already experiencing visions and dreams about some past tragedy. Why shouldn’t we get to have super-powers too?”

  Luke smiled. “Guess you’re right.”

  “Besides, I think I’ve discovered what my gift is.”

  CHAPTER 35

  “You’re reading the mind of the bad guy?” Luke’s words sounded half question, half exclamation.

  “Not really mind-reading,” I said. “It’s more like random thoughts just drop into my consciousness.”

  “Either way, it’s a tremendous insight,” Gwen put in.

  “And now we’ve pretty much got confirmation that this person is after you, and wants me out of the way.” Luke cleared the plates from the table and loaded them into the dishwasher.

  “I think we have to assume this somehow parallels what you’ve seen in the dreams and visions,” Gwen said. “That whatever befell these two people was the result of someone’s intense jealousy.”

  Luke leaned against the counter and shoved his hands through his hair, letting out a huge, frustrated sigh. “Should we expect to be abducted and murdered, too?”

  My breath caught in my throat with a sharp pain that radiated into my chest. Was it possible?

  “I don’t want to even think that,” Gwen said, pulling me to her side with one arm and grabbing Luke’s hand with the other. “The pranks you’ve experienced so far have been rather juvenile, even though the tampering with Layla’s car could’ve been dangerous. Perhaps if the villain of this scenario has been reincarnated in a teenager, his vengeance will also assume adolescent form.”

  “We’ve thought all along that Kara was behind the stunts,” Luke said.

  Gwen nodded. “She’d be a likely suspect, if the thoughts Layla’s been reading didn’t indicate a male.”

  “It’s possible Kara’s being used,” I suggested, looking at Lucas. “Everyone at school knows your history with her, and everyone is aware of her jealousy. She’d be an easy tool for our culprit.”

  “Miller’s behavior makes him suspect,” Luke said. “And the fact that Lance also asked you out creates suspicion. He always turns things into a competition, like he’s got to be better than me all the time. Both of them run in the same circles as Kara.”

  “Which would make it easier to get her on board with the plan.”

  The phone rang, and Gwen went down the hall to her office to answer it. By the sound of her voice it must’ve been someone she was glad to hear from.

  With her chatting happily down the hall, Lucas turned to me.

  “I have another theory,” he said once Gwen was gone. “About something we saw in the dream the night of the storm.”

  My muscles tightened as I remembered what we’d seen that night. “What is it?”

  “I think Lillian died in childbirth.”

  All the breath left my lungs and my chest burned. At first my mind resisted the idea. The grief was too great. But after a moment I saw the logic, as images from the drea
m floated across my mind.

  “She was alone when we saw her,” Luke said. “Like she was hiding. If she realized she was pregnant, it makes sense that she’d try to get away from whoever had taken her. She was by herself in that abandoned shack. It didn’t hit me right off the bat, but when I thought about it later,” he stopped, took a deep breath. “The way she was moving, the sounds she was making, it made me wonder.”

  He paused again. I still said nothing, too dumbfounded to put words together.

  “I don’t know much about childbirth, obviously,” he said, then swallowed hard. “But the blood on the floor underneath her...” his voice trailed off.

  “I know,” I whispered, finally finding my voice. “I think you’re right.”

  “I googled some things about childbirth complications,” he went on. “There are a number of things that can happen that would cause a woman to hemorrhage like that, especially if she hasn’t had proper prenatal care.”

  “I don’t even know how to feel about this,” I said. “I mean, it’s awful. The most terrible thing I can imagine. But since I’ve obviously never been pregnant, I don’t have any sort of frame of reference for this kind of loss.”

  “Me either.” He came over and kissed my cheek. “I wonder if by reincarnating into younger versions of themselves, they might have been trying to make it easier on us. Not that we don’t have a lot at stake, but at least there’s not a pregnancy to worry about.”

  I thought back to the night of the dream, when physical closeness exploded between us. Keeping our heads level in the midst of a hormone overload suddenly took on more meaning.

  The thought of suffering that kind of loss devastated me, even though I had no knowledge of it. I grieved for Lillian, for what she must’ve endured in that shack all alone.

  For the first time since the dreams began, I knew what I had to do. It was time to not just endure what she showed me. It was time to embrace it. Embrace her.

  Embrace them.

  “We’ve got to ask them again, Luke,” I whispered. “We have to ask them to show us what happened.”

  CHAPTER 36