Dreams Underfoot

All I had left of her was an old photograph that Jilly and I found in Moore’s Antiques a little while later. It had a photographer’s date on the back: 1912. It was Sam in the picture, Sam with a group of strangers standing on the front porch of some old house.

I remembered her, but she’d never existed. That’s what I had to believe. Because nothing else made sense. I had all these feelings and memories of her, but they had to be what my brother called jamais vu.

That’s like deja vu, except instead of having felt you’d been somewhere before, you remembered something that had never happened. I’d never heard the expression before—he got it from a David Morrell thriller that he’d been reading—but it had an authentic ring about it.

Jamais vu.

But Jilly remembered Sam, too.

Thinking about Sam always brought a tightness to my chest; it made my head hurt trying to figure it out. I felt as if I were betraying Sam by trying to convince myself she’d never existed, but I had to convince myself of that, because believing that it really had happened was even scarier. How do you live in a world where anything can happen?

“You’ll get used to it,” Jilly told me. “There’s a whole invisible world out there, lying side by side with our own. Once you get a peek into it, the window doesn’t close. You’re always going to be aware of it.”

“I don’t want to be,” I said.

She just shook her head. “You don’t really get a lot of choice in this kind of thing,” she said.

You always have a choice—that’s what I believe. And I chose to not get caught up in some invisible world of ghosts and spirits and who knew what. But I still dreamed of Sam, as if she’d been real. I still kept her photo in my fiddlecase.

I could feel its presence right now, glimmering through the leather, whispering to me.

Remember me ...

I couldn’t forget. Jamais vu. But I wanted to.

Jilly scooted a little closer to me on the step and laid a hand on my knee.

“Denying it just makes things worse,” she said, continuing an old ongoing argument that I don’t think we’ll ever resolve. “Until you accept that it really happened, the memory’s always going to haunt you, undermining everything that makes you who you are.”

“Haunted like Paperjack?” I asked, trying to turn the subject back onto more comfortable ground, or at least focus the attention onto someone other than myself. “Is that what you think’s happened to him?”

Jilly sighed. “Memories can be just like ghosts,” she said. Didn’t I know it.

I looked down the steps to where Paperjack had been sitting, but he was gone, and now a couple of pigeons were waddling across the steps. The wind blew a candy bar wrapper up against a riser. I laid my hand on Dilly’s and gave it a squeeze, then picked up my fiddlecase and stood up.

“I’ve got to go,” I told her.

“I didn’t mean to upset you ...”

“I know. I’ve just got to walk for a bit and think.”

She didn’t offer to accompany me and for that I was glad. Jilly was my best friend, but right then I had to be alone.

I went rambling; just let my feet just take me wherever they felt like going, south from St. Paul’s and down Battersfield Road, all the way to the Pier, my fiddlecase banging against my thigh as I walked.

When I got to the waterfront, I leaned up against the fieldstone wall where the Pier met the beach. I stood and watched the fishermen work their lines farther out over the lake. Fat gulls wheeled above, crying like they hadn’t been fed in months. Down on the sand, a couple was having an animated discussion, but they were too far away for me to make out what they were arguing about. They looked like figures in some old silent movie; caricatures, their movements larger than life, rather than real people.

I don’t know what I was thinking about; I was trying not to think, I suppose, but I wasn’t having much luck. The arguing couple depressed me.

Hang on to what you’ve got, I wanted to tell them, but it wasn’t any of my business. I thought about heading across town to Fitzhenry Park—there was a part of it called the Silenus Gardens filled with stone benches and statuary where I always felt better—when I spied a familiar figure sitting down by the river west of the Pier: Paperjack.

The Kickaha River was named after that branch of the Algonquin language family that originally lived in this area before the white men came and took it all away from them. All the tribe had left now was a reservation north of the city and this river named after them. The Kickaha had its source north of the reserve and cut through the city on its way to the lake. In this part of town it separated the business section and commercial waterfront from the Beaches where the money lives.

There are houses in the Beaches that make the old stately homes in Lower Crowsea look like tenements, but you can’t see them from here. Looking west, all you see is green—first the City Commission’s manicured lawns on either side of the river, then the treed hills that hide the homes of the wealthy from the rest of us plebes. On the waterfront itself are a couple of country clubs and the private beaches of the really wealthy whose estates back right onto the water.

Paperjack was sitting on this side of the river, doing I don’t know what. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell. He seemed to be just sitting there on the riverbank, watching the slow water move past. I watched him for awhile, then hoisted my fiddlecase from where I’d leaned it against the wall and hopped down to the sand. When I got to where he was sitting, he looked up and gave me an easy, welcoming grin, as if he’d been expecting me to show up.

Running into him like this was fate, Jilly would say. I’ll stick to calling it coincidence. It’s a big city, but it isn’t that big.

Paperjack made a motion with his hand, indicating I should pull up a bit of lawn beside him. I hesitated for a moment—right up until then, I realized later, everything could have worked out differently.

But I made the choice and sat beside him.

There was a low wall, right down by the water, with rushes and lilies growing up against it. Among the lilies was a family of ducks—mother and a paddling of ducklings—and that was what Paperjack had been watching. He had an empty plastic bag in his hand, and the breadcrumbs that remained in the bottom told me he’d been feeding the ducks until his bread ran out.

He made another motion with his hand, touching the bag, then pointing to the ducks.

I shook my head. “I wasn’t planning on coming down,” I said, “so I didn’t bring anything to feed them.”

He nodded, understanding.

We sat quietly awhile longer. The ducks finally gave up on us and paddled farther up the river, looking for better pickings. Once they were gone, Paperjack turned to me again. He laid his hand against his heart, then raised his eyebrows questioningly.

Looking at that slim black hand with its long narrow fingers lying against his dark suit, I marveled again at the sheer depth of his ebony coloring. Even with the bit of a tan I’d picked up busking the last few weeks, I felt absolutely pallid beside him. Then I lifted my gaze to his eyes. If his skin swallowed light, I knew where it went: into his eyes. They were dark, so dark you could barely tell the difference between pupil and cornea, but inside their darkness was a kind of glow—a shine that resonated inside me like the deep hum that comes from my fiddle’s bass strings whenever I play one of those wild Shetland reels in A minor.

I suppose it’s odd, describing something visual in terms of sound, but right then, right at that moment, I heard the shine of his eyes, singing inside me. And I understood immediately what he’d meant by his gesture.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m feeling a little low.”

He touched his chest again, but it was a different, lighter gesture this time. I knew what that meant as well.

“There’s not much anybody can do about it,” I said.

Except Sam. She could come back. Or maybe if I just knew she’d been real ... But that opened a whole other line of thinking that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into again. I wanted her to have been