Dreams Underfoot

He told me a lot of other stuff, but I was only half listening. The business with Paperjack last night and the fortunetelling device this morning were still eating away at me. I did take down the address of Sam’s granddaughter when it came up. Begley ran out of steam after another five minutes or so.

“You got enough there?” he asked.

I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Thanks a lot.”

“Say hello to Jilly for me and tell her she owes me one.”

After I hung up, I looked out the window for a long time. I managed to shift gears from Paperjack to thinking about what Begley had told me, about wheels, about Sam. Finally I got up and took a shower and shaved. I put on my cleanest jeans and shirt and shrugged on a sports jacket that had seen better days before I bought it in a retro fashion shop. I thought about leaving my fiddle behind, but knew I’d feel naked without it—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone somewhere without it. The leather handle felt comforting in my hand as I hefted the case and went out the door.

All the way over to the address Begley had given me I tried to think of what I was going to say when I met Sam’s granddaughter. The truth would make me sound like I was crazy, but I couldn’t seem to concoct a story that would make sense.

I remember wondering—where was my brother when I needed him? Christy was never at a loss for words, no matter what the situation.

It wasn’t until I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house that I decided to stick as close to the truth as I could—I was an old friend of her grandmother’s, could she put me in touch with her?—and take it from there. But even my vague plans went out the door when I rang the bell and stood faceto-face with Sam’s granddaughter.

Maybe you saw this coming, but it was the last thing I’d expected. The woman had Sam’s hair, Sam’s eyes, Sam’s face ... to all intents and purposes it was Sam standing there, looking at me with that vaguely uncertain expression that most of us wear when we open the door to a stranger standing on our steps.

My chest grew so tight I could barely breathe, and suddenly I could hear the sound of rain in my memory—it was always raining when Sam saw the ghost; it was raining the night he stole her away into the past.

Ghosts. I was looking at a ghost.

The woman’s expression was starting to change, the uncertainty turning into nervousness. There was no recognition in her eyes. As she began to step back—in a moment she’d close the door in my face, probably call the cops—I found my voice. I knew what I was going to say—I was going to ask about her grandmother—but all that came out was her name: “Sam.”

“Yes?” she said. She looked at me a little more carefully. “Do I know you?”

Jesus, even the name was the same.

A hundred thoughts were going through my head, but they all spiraled down into one mad hope: this was Sam. We could be together again. Then a child appeared behind the woman. She was a little girl no more than five, blondehaired, blueeyed, just like her mother—just like her mother’s grandmother.

Reality came crashing down around me.

This Sam wasn’t the woman I knew. She was married, she had children, she had a life.

“I ... I knew your grandmother,” I said. “We were ... we used to be friends.”

It sounded so inane to my ears, almost crazy. What would her grandmother—a woman maybe three times my age if she was still alive—have to do with a guy like me?

The woman’s gaze traveled down to my fiddlecase. “Is your name Geordie? Geordie Riddell?”

I blinked in surprise, then nodded slowly.

The woman smiled a little sadly, mostly with her eyes.

“Granny said you’d come by,” she said. “She didn’t know when, but she said you’d come by one day.” She stepped away from the door, shooing her daughter down the hall. “Would you like to come in?”

“I ... uh, sure.”

She led me into a living room that was furnished in mismatched antiques that, taken all together, shouldn’t have worked, but did.

The little girl perched in a Morris chair and watched me curiously as I sat down and set my fiddlecase down by my feet. Her mother pushed back a stray lock with a mannerism so like Sam’s that my chest tightened up even more.

“Would you like some coffee or tea?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t want to intrude. I I ...” Words escaped me again.

“You’re not intruding,” she said. She sat down on the couch in front of me, that sad look back in her eyes. “My grandmother died a few years ago—she’d moved to New England in the late seventies, and she died there in her sleep. Because she loved it so much, we buried her there in a small graveyard overlooking the sea.”

I could see it in my mind as she spoke. I could hear the sound of the waves breaking on the shore below, the spray falling on the rocks like rain.

“She and I were very close, a lot closer than I ever felt to my mother.” She gave me a rueful look.

“You know how it is.”

She didn’t seem to be expecting a response, but I nodded anyway.

“When her estate was settled, most of her personal effects came to me. I ...” She paused, then stood up. “Excuse me for a moment, would you?”

I nodded again. She’d looked sad, talking about Sam. I hoped that bringing it all up hadn’t made her cry.

The little girl and I sat in silence, looking at each other until her mother returned. She was such a serious kid, her big eyes taking everything in; she sat quietly, not running around or acting up like most kids do when there’s someone new in the house that they can show off to. I didn’t think she was shy; she was just ... well, serious.

Her mother had a package wrapped in brown paper and twine in her hands when she came back.

She sat down across from me again and laid the package on the table between us.

“Granny told me a story once,” she said, “about her first and only real true love. It was an odd story, a kind of ghost story, about how she’d once lived in the future until granddad’s love stole her away from her own time and brought her to his.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “I knew it was just a story because, when I was growing up I’d met people she’d gone to school with, friends from her past before she met granddad. Besides, it was too much like some science fiction story.

“But it was true, wasn’t it?”

I could only nod. I didn’t understand how Sam and everything about her except my memories of her could vanish into the past, how she could have a whole new set of memories when she got back there, but I knew it was true.

I accepted it now, just as Jilly had been trying to get me to do for years. When I looked at Sam’s granddaughter, I saw that she accepted it as well.

“When her effects were sent to me,” she went on, “I found this package in them. It’s addressed to you.”

I had seen my name on it, written in a familiar hand. My own hand trembled as I reached over to pick it up.

“You don’t have to open it now,” she said.

I was grateful for that.

“I ... I’d better go,” I said and stood up. “Thank you for taking the time to see me.”

That sad smile was back as she saw me to the door.

“I’m glad I got the chance to meet you,” she said when I stepped out onto the porch.

I wasn’t sure I could say the same. She looked so much like Sam, sounded so much like Sam, that it hurt.

“I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other again,” she added. No. She had her husband, her family. I had my ghosts. “Thanks,” I said again and started off down the walk, fiddlecase in one hand, the brown paper package in the other.

I didn’t open the package until I was sitting in the Silenus Gardens in Fitzhenry Park, a place that always made me feel good; I figured I was going to need all the help I could get. Inside there was a book with a short letter. The book I recognized. It was the small J. M. Dent & Sons edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I’d given Sam because I’d known it was one of her favorite