Once Upon Another Time (34 page)

“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 into 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.”