Fun Zone! I’m such a loser.”
“You took me to a magic waterfall,” I reminded him. “You stopped time.”
We lay tangled up in each other, leg over leg, fingers in each other’s hair. And that’s when I realized what the kites had been. Our spirits had flown toward each other when the ghosts had come together in the bodies we’d left behind.
Bless them, I thought. Bless the souls that flew us together and tangled us up.
“Oh my God,” he sighed, staring into my eyes. “I’m going to jail.”
“Why?” For a moment I was frightened, but he laughed.
“That bike back there,” he confessed. “I stole it.”
“It’ll be okay,” I told him. “I’m holding on to you. Where you go, I go.”
CHAPTER 30
Helen
TIME IS A RIBBON, A DELICATE ORGANDY, so thin that you can see through it to the layer of time below and the layer above. Moments overlapping, lying on top of each other. In this way, past things and things yet-to-be are happening together. The hurt and the healing. The death and the reconciliation in heaven. The childhood and the womanhood. The first glance and the first kiss and the last.
This must be true, for I can see through this moment not only to my recent past and my far past, but into the next moment and the distant future. There was a child, my own little girl. And there will be another child. Not of Helen and James, but a little boy with Jenny’s gold hair and Billy’s eyes. Someday.
And if time is a ribbon, surely it could be rolled out all together, then looped on its spindle the other way ’round. Then one could unspool it backwards.
Instead of nearly knocking her down, a woman at a shop door catches Jenny and sets her on her feet. Holy water flies back into the pitcher of an angry woman as she stands over a frightened girl. Instead of walking backwards into the dark, I walk forward toward Jenny’s window, where I see her waiting for me to speak to her, the back of her hand lifted to the empty air. Messages James and I once wrote fold themselves back up and hide in Billy’s pocket. Jenny lies in her backyard as I recite a poem in reverse: Seep we down as all us of mud make, deep press time of layers . . .
Jenny sees a forgotten boy beside her in the mirror, but then turns and the recognition fades from her eyes. Then in a bathtub, instead of waking, she falls back into the water and becomes still. I lay naked with James in Billy’s rumpled bed and the image of our smiling faces fades off of a small square photograph, which flies back into the camera. In a hidden place between two school buildings, James takes back the sin of his kiss and sets me down on my feet again. After my first glimpse through Jenny’s eyes, I close them, shudder, and struggle my way out of her body as she sits beside her mother at a church picnic. I am blown away from Billy’s house up into a storm and thrown back to Mr. Brown’s window.
All these moments of reverse time are leading to my first moment with James. The fear of being noticed after a hundred years disappears as I look into a pair of autumn-colored eyes.
One
SOMEONE WAS LOOKING AT ME, a disturbing sensation if you’re dead. I was with my teacher, Mr. Brown. As usual, we were in our classroom, that safe and wooden-walled box—the windows opening onto the grassy field to the west, the fading flag standing in the chalk dust corner, the television mounted above the bulletin board like a sleeping eye, and Mr. Brown’s princely table keeping watch over a regiment of student desks. At that moment I was scribbling invisible comments in the margins of a paper left in Mr. Brown’s tray, though my words were never read by the students. Sometimes Mr. Brown quoted me, all the same, while writing his own comments. Perhaps I couldn’t tickle the inside of his ear, but I could reach the mysterious curves of his mind.
Although I could not feel paper between my fingers, smell ink, or taste the tip of a pencil, I could see and hear the world with all the clarity of the Living. They, on the other hand, did not see me as a shadow or a floating vapor. To the Quick, I was empty air.
Or so I thought. As an