by H. G. Nadel
They became aware of their surroundings as the blaring sirens of the police cars grew louder. They parted lips but couldn’t let go, as if they had been separated for the eternities and had just found one another once again. Julia had never before looked so deeply into the eyes of another human being. Austin returned her gaze with equal intensity. Julia felt naked, exposed in some deeper way—and she didn’t mind at all. Looking into this man’s eyes was like looking into forever. The idea of infinity had always enthralled Julia, and at this moment she felt as if she could grasp it not just as a mathematic principle or scientific theory, but as something real that a person could find in the soul of her true love. He was here, now. She didn’t know how she was so sure. She just was.
Austin grinned, breaking the intensity of the moment. “I think it’s time for me to formally invite you out on a date.”
“What about fraternizing with a witness?”
“Policies be damned!” he said with the flair of a Shakespearean actor, and they both laughed. Then he reached out, stroked her cheek, and said quietly, “We have too much at stake. Come on.”
Austin led Julia back up the trail and into the building. As they walked down a corridor of the mostly empty police station, he let go of her hand. A couple of cops from the night shift sat in the break room talking shop. Austin took her into a larger room with about half a dozen desks and stopped at a desk in the middle of the room. It looked more or less utilitarian, except for three plastic action figures with the brawny chests of wrestlers with heads that didn’t match. She stared more closely at the heads: one had long, dark hair and a thin mustache; another looked like an ancient Greek bust with a beard; and another sported a bishop’s hat.
“I see you’re admiring my friends: Descartes, Aristotle, and Augustine.” He picked up the third one and made the arms move up and down. “Our friend Augustine can beat the sin out of the other two.”
Julia laughed and picked up another. “But Descartes can destroy them all with one powerful flex of his thoughts.”
“Julia, are you willing to tell me everything Bertel told you tonight?”
“Of course.”
They put down the philosopher action figures. Austin gave her his rolling chair and sat down in the straight-backed chair next to the desk usually reserved for witnesses and visitors. Then he reached over and grabbed a pen and yellow legal pad from his desktop, but not before she noticed a word scrawled multiple times across the pad. She couldn’t completely make out Austin’s scribbling penmanship, but she could have sworn it was a name, something like Helen.
For the next twenty minutes she told him everything she could remember about her meeting with Bertel, word by word, phrase by phrase—it was so terrifying, she remembered it all. Austin asked her to scoot over so he could show her something on his computer. He opened a file on his desktop, and a photo appeared. It was a young, blond man wearing glasses, a suit, and a tie. He looked oddly familiar. At first, she didn’t know why. Then she blanched. Without the glasses …
“It’s the guy who jumped on your car! Who is he?”
“You never saw him before tonight?” he asked.
“No. Should I have?”
“His name is Winston Bresner. He was Bertel’s last lab assistant, before you.”
Julia’s eyes widened in horror.
They were still staring at the photo when Jack walked in.
“Hey, Jack,” Austin said. “Come check this out.”
“Who’re we looking at?”
Austin told Jack what he’d just told Julia.
Jack whistled. “This just gets deeper and deeper, don’t it? We gonna look for this kid?”
“Not yet.” Austin stood and turned to Julia. “Jack said you were about to call your father earlier. Are you and your dad on good terms?”
“Yes. I mean, it hurts when we see each other because of Mom not being there anymore. But he’s a good man.”
“Where does he live?”
“Dana Point.”
“Do you think you can go spend some time with him?”
Julia nodded.
“Great. I will go with you to your father’s house—”
Jack cut in. “I don’t think so, loverboy. I may have given you free reign on this case, but I’m still the senior partner. You work on tracking down this Winston kid, and I’ll take Julia to her father’s house. Okay?”
“Okay,” they both said in unison.
Jack lifted an eyebrow and winked. “Jack’s gypsy cab at your service. Oh, and this time don’t give me the slip. It’d be nice not to have to chase you to hell and back again.”
“Oh,” she said, her face hot. “I’m so sorry about that.”
Jack shook his head and gave her a grudging smile, “Yeah, yeah. Teenagers. Never trust anyone over thirty, right? I’m used to it. But hey, I’m on Austin’s side, and that’s your side too, kid. Right?”
She nodded, ashamed of her actions an hour ago but relieved that she knew who she could trust.
Austin reached out as if to shake her hand; but when she placed it in his, he lifted it to his lips and kissed it. Then he wrapped both hands around hers and looked into her eyes. She craved his lips on hers but knew he wouldn’t kiss her in front of Jack. “Please, Julia, don’t talk to anyone about any of this, okay? Not until we know what’s going on.”
“You have my word,” she said.
He let her hand go, pushed a strand of hair away from her eyes, and rested his palm on her cheek for a second, as he gave her a reassuring smile. Then the spell broke, and he became the detective once again. “All right, back to work here. See you two tomorrow.”
As Jack drove Julia to Dana Point, a clear night opened bright above them, revealing the illumination of a billion stars shining in a symphony of hope. She had never felt this way about anyone, ever. As she drifted off to sleep, she could see his face as he leaned over her hand to kiss it, while Aristotle’s mantra floated through her mind: “Two hearts living in the same soul.”
NINETEEN
She stares into the incandescent heart of the blazing fire, wondering at the magic of the flames, searching for the place of their beginning—that invisible, explosive force between the wood and the air. The tightly piled logs generate enough heat to keep the vast, high-ceilinged grand room of the chateau feeling warm and cozy. She and Pierre sit wrapped in each other’s arms, sunk into a comfortable pile of cushions before the fireplace.
The two have been sharing a lively exchange that was for her a vigorous mental workout, but she has fallen silent for a moment, concerned they’ve begun to tread on dangerous ground.
“Don’t you agree that Aristotle’s philosophy can shed light on our understanding ofthe Trinity?” Pierre asks, sitting up so suddenly that he upsets some of the cushions, tumbling her sideways. “Each of God’s aspects depends on the other for its reality: God as actuality, Christ as potentiality, and the Holy Spirit the result of the relationship between them.”
She gives him an exasperated look, as she rights the pillows. “Beware, my lord.”
He stares at her in consternation, then laughs.”Beware, ma mie? Since when are you afraid of anything?”
“I don’t fear for myself but for you.”
“You fear for my immortal soul?”
“No, my beloved. I fear for your earthly life. I believe God is a loving and forgiving father who would not punish one of his children for seeking a different version of the truth than other men have declared. Yet the wrath of men may be greater than that of God.”
His reply is heavy with sadness. “I will be deemed a heretic by the Church no matter how I present this, my love. I cannot pretend to be other than who I am. If I did, I would fear for my soul.”
She thinks for a moment. “You may be able to have it both ways. You need not be deemed a heretic if… if you first declare that you embrace the divine revelation.”
His gaze intensifies with curiosity. “Go on …”
She gives him a kno
wing smile. “Once there is no doubt that you accept the word of God as infallible, then you introduce your concept of realism. You explain that you do not mean to contradict the Church but wish simply to add information that can exist peacefully alongside its teachings.”
“And how do you propose I convince them that this is not blasphemy?”he says, bringing his face closer to hers.
“It’s not blasphemy, but a compromise,” she ventures. “Man has many ideas that are not written in the Holy Bible, yet the Church does not deem them all heresy. Once you make sure no one doubts your adherence to the Church, then you can help them understand Aristotle’s logic may support the Church’s theology, not contradict it.”
His eyes are bright as he takes her face between his hands. “Your mind is so agile, my love.” He kisses her with avid passion until she’s breathless. She pushes him away, disappointed to realize that the light in his face is not from agreement but amusement. She curses her fate to be born woman, to forever have her intelligence viewed as an entertaining surprise, like the trick of a clever dog. Though if she had been born a man, who would have been her Pierre?
“Is that the only response you have for my wise and well-thought words?” she says. “My lord sees but one use, and one use only, for my lips.”
He takes her hand and presses it to his lips. “Au contraire, ma mie. You win this debate. Truly! Your idea is philosophically sound. If only you could confront the church leaders in my stead.” He grins. “Unfortunately, they might be distracted by your beauty…”
“… and tempted to burn me as a witch.”
“They would have to kill me, first.”
She gives him a sideways grin, as they both try to make light of what they both know is serious as death itself. She knows there is no way to dissuade him from speaking what he believes to be the truth, and she knows he’s right: Logic won’t help him. The leaders aren’t interested in logic but, rather, control. How can they control that which they have not codified? She kisses him tenderly, wondering how many more kisses they may share before the end.
She feels a soft kick against her growing womb. She pulls back from Pierre, and places his hand on her rounded belly.
“Our child wants to be heard on this matter,” she says.
He brings his face down on a level with the gentle curve of her abdomen and speaks to his unborn child, “You do agree with your mother, don’t you, my son? Well then, who am I to argue with the two people I love most?”
She feels ill, as if she might vomit. But this sickness is different from the early days of her pregnancy. Fear, she realizes, could incapacitate a person just as effectively as illness. She swallows and says nothing.
Pierre brings his face close to hers, rubbing cheek-to-cheek, nose-to-nose, forehead-to-forehead, as he says, “I am a poet, a lover, a soon-to-be father. I spend all my nights in love and my days writing songs. I can no longer be called wise.” He presses his lips to hers, and then whispers. “I love you, my Heloise, my wife.”
She senses someone else in the room and turns to see her uncle standing in the doorway, his face twisted with jealousy. He marches into the room, and as he draws near, his face becomes clear. Someone familiar.
Suddenly, the room vanishes, and she finds herself in a different place. A cloister. She hears women’s voices singing in a distant hall. She feels a terrible pain clutch her abdomen and realizes she is in labor. She’s lying on a bed, surrounded by a circle of nuns. One holds her hand, another wipes her brow with a damp cloth, and another stands between her legs, which are draped in white. “Here’s the head, then. One more push!” Her head swims in blackness as another pain pushes through her, and she feels the baby slip out of her.
Moments later, she is holding her infant son in her arms, feeling his warm little body against her breast, staring into his dark blue eyes as they try to focus on some small part of this new world, sliding her index finger into the crook of his tiny palm and watching his miniscule fingers fold over the top. She listens to each innocent breath hitch in and out. A child, the son of her soulmate, alive and depending on her tender care.
A pair of bony hands takes the child from her caress. She screams in futile agony, “Astrolabe! No!” But her cries are lost in the depths of the night, and she is unable to chase after her son. Her screams vanish along with the room.
She is now standing in a church, draped in a nun’s habit, watching her beloved Pierre repeat his priestly vow of chastity. She feels too tired and beaten to cry. She reaches up to her neck, touching the heavy cross that hangs there, gleaming in a weak ray of sun that slips through the bars on the high windows above. She knows this is a church, but at this moment it feels like a prison. She lets go of the cross, reaches into the folds of her habit, and clasps the small, jeweled heart Pierre gave her in the forest one day, an eternity ago. How can he become a priest, how can she become a nun, when they are still husband and wife? They took their vows in secret, yet they took them before a priest and before God. “Until death do us part,” they said—Heloise and her beloved Pierre.
A hand shook her awake. “Julia, we’re here.”
“Here?” She opened her eyes to see Jack sitting next to her in the driver’s seat of his car.
“At your dad’s house.”
“Heloise!” Julia said, stunned. “That was the name he wrote on the tablet. Not Helen. Heloise.” Her eyes widened as she remembered that mysterious phone call: “Heloise, did you miss me, dearest? I’m coming back for you.” But it couldn’t have been Austin who made that call. Could it?
“Are you all right?” Jack asked
Julia sat up and rubbed her eyes. “I’m fine. Just a bad dream.”
He walked her to the front door, where she gave her dad a hug and introduced him to Jack. Explaining that she was tired, she left them at the door talking, while she hurried to her dad’s study and turned on the computer. She impatiently waited for it to boot up; and as soon as it did, she opened a browser and Googled “Pierre and Heloise.” Google returned 1,200,000 results. Her eyes scanned the first page: Peter Abelard, Héloïse dArgenteuil, A Medieval Love Story, The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Landmarks of Love, Chronicles of Love and Resentment, and … Stealing Heaven.”
She opened the last one. Stealing Heaven was a movie about real-life, star-crossed lovers: a 12th-century French scholar, lecturer, and poet named Pierre Abelard who broke a vow of celibacy to have an affair with Heloise, a beautiful sixteen-year-old girl who lived with her Uncle Fulbert in Paris. The girl was highly regarded as the greatest female mind in all of France. She heard the front door close, so she skimmed the rest: Pierre’s love for Heloise, his guilt toward God, the pair’s secret marriage, their child, Fulbert’s anger over the ensuing scandal that sullied his family’s noble name. The stupid website won’t say how the movie ended, she thought in frustration. Guess that would be a spoiler.
When she heard her father coming down the hall, she closed the browser. Morton popped his head in the door. “Shouldn’t you get some sleep? I, uh, heard you had a rough night.” That was the understatement of the year.
“Yeah, all right. I was just checking e-mail.” She shut off the computer and followed him out the door.
Morton walked her to her old room, which still looked much the same as it had when she’d moved out. “I, um, guess you know where everything is,” he fumbled awkwardly. “Remember, I’m just across the hall if you need me.”
“Thanks, Daddy.” She hadn’t called him that since she was a girl. She hugged him around the neck and kissed his cheek. In that instant, the tension melted, and for a moment they were back to how they were before Mom died, before Julia moved out, and before all of the sadness vexed their home. Julia hugged her father a moment longer, glad to be back.
As he walked across the hall to his room, she called after him, “Hey Dad?”
“Yeah, sweetie?”
“Have you ever heard of Abelard and Heloise?”
“Sure. France’s real-l
ife Romeo and Juliet. Why?”
“Nothing. Just some movie a friend told me about.”
“I didn’t know it was made into a movie.”
“Probably because it wasn’t very good. ‘Night, Daddy.’“
“Goodnight, baby.” Funny how much it bothered her when Tyler called her “baby” but how much she liked it when her father said it.
She closed her bedroom door, pulled off her clothes, threw on an old T-shirt she’d left behind in the chest of drawers, and crawled into bed. She stared into the dark. A real-life Romeo and Juliet? That did not sound good at all.
TWENTY
The next morning, after her father left for work, she returned to his computer. She assumed Dr. Bertel still had her laptop. She spent a couple of hours researching the story of Abelard and Heloise. After a while, it was difficult to see the computer screen through the tears in her eyes. She’d never gotten this worked up over Romeo and Juliet—but then they weren’t real, and Juliet wasn’t her.
A year ago, Julia would have considered the idea of a past life ridiculous. But she was beginning to accept that perhaps science just hadn’t progressed far enough yet. It was difficult to deny the uncanny coincidences swirling through both her waking and dreaming life. And when she looked up historic portraits of Pierre Abelard and Heloise d’Argenteuil, it was impossible to deny the uncanny resemblance they bore to Austin Moore and herself.
She thought back to recent events. If she were Heloise and Austin were Pierre, then it was possible that the phone call she had received from a Frenchman saying he had come back for her was Heloise’s uncle, Fulbert. If so, Austin was in even more trouble than she was. In another lifetime, Fulbert had taken an unspeakable revenge against Pierre for marrying his niece in secret and thereby ruining his reputation. Julia winced as she read from the computer screen.