Still, he couldn’t take advantage of anyone. He would never cheat on Sara-Kate, no matter what happened between them earlier that night, or the fact she wanted nothing to do with him any longer.
“Thank you, but I need to get home.” He turned on as much of a smile as he could muster, and continued his way down the street. He needed to get back to Sara-Kate and apologize to her, beg her forgiveness if needed. Realistically, he knew the chances of her forgiving him were next to none. He said too many nasty things, none of which was true. She was just a convenient target. It was all fear and shock that drove the hateful words from his mouth.
When he reached the end of the street, he stopped to get his bearings. A strange tingle began somewhere deep within his brain.
Sara-Kate was near.
It was impossible, he knew. He was nowhere near her house, and she never left her home. Yet, he felt her. She was so close. It was almost that if he strained hard enough, he would hear her breathe. He picked up his pace. The only sound now was the soft thudding of his bare feet against the pavement. He stopped again, and listened. This time he heard a strange, stained sound, an almost metallic groan.
From the corner of his eye, he noticed motion. Then he was saw her, even in the darkness. Sara-Kate, swinging back and forth in the children’s playground. Love and relief bubbled to his surface. He hurried toward her.
Once he arrived beside her, it was as if a huge, heavy steel door closed between them. Her anger was so stark and real, he could feel it pulse without her uttering a single word.
The realization of her feelings caused a potent mixture of sadness and devastation. He could no more than sink into the swing beside her.
After a few minutes of nothing but the groan of the chains above them, she finally spoke.
“What do you want, Reed?” Bitterness edged her every word.
“I want you, Sara.”
She let out a sarcastic chuckle.
He should have expected her caustic attitude, but it still stung.
“Okay then, I need...answers. I think I deserve that much.”
After a few minutes, she finally responded. “What do you want to know? I already told you everything.”
“No, you haven’t. I need to understand how I got here. What you are. What we are.”
“Reed, you’re asking me for complicated answers that I don’t even know. I told you, there are dimensions, different worlds, planes of existence. You didn’t really think that your own little world you come from was the only one in this universe, did you?”
“I never gave it much thought,” he answered truthfully.
“Let me explain this the best way I know how to. There are many Reed Thayers that exist. In one world, you died. In another, you’ve never been born. In one world, we’re married. In another, you might have a wife and three kids. There are an infinite number of worlds or dimensions with incarnations of both of us, Reed. We’ll never meet them, but they do exist. Somehow, someway, when you died in one dimension, you managed to travel as a spirit into this one where Reed Thayer never existed...at least as far as I can tell.”
To Reed, her explanation sounded so simple, but so unbelievably mind blowing.
“How?” he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Your guess is as good as mine. Perhaps the Fates have something special in mind for you. There are no mistakes. You ended up here for a reason, but I don’t know what that reason is. That is for you to figure out.”
“Fates?”
“It’s just my word for them. Whatever they are, supreme beings, gods...I don’t know. All I know is they exist. They reside somewhere on the highest level of all these dimensions.”
He rocked back and forth on the swing trying to absorb her words.
“So this is...what? Heaven, hell?” Even before he said the word hell, he knew it wasn’t true. With Sara-Kate, there was no hell.
“That’s too complicated of a question for tonight, Reed. Let’s just say this is a place very similar to the one you come from, and leave it at that. Oh, and if you’re wondering if you can just return to your own dimension and pick up your life, the answer is no. You’re dead there. Even if you somehow managed a return, no one will recognize you.”
He hadn’t even considered the possibility of returning back to his own dimension...his old world, simply because he didn’t want to leave Sara-Kate—ever. She didn’t want to hear that right now, maybe never again.
“So...what about you?”
“What about me?” she asked.
He rolled his eyes. “Maybe if you could explain your life and how you got here, it might help me to understand. I realize now that you’ve been skirting the truth since we met.”
“So, you think I’ve been lying to you?”
“No, I don’t think that at all,” he stressed.
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
He didn’t understand her statement. Did he not matter to her any longer?
“What do you want to know?” she asked.
“How old are you?”
She let out a light laugh. “I was born in 1911.”
He sucked in his breath, but didn’t comment. This was all too unreal. Even a few weeks earlier, he would have believed everything Sara-Kate said to be the ramblings of a psychotic woman. Now he knew better.
“I died in the winter of 1929.”
“You were just a baby,” he remarked. No wonder she looked so young.
“I had just turned eighteen. Not a baby in 1929. I was working at a candy shop, wrapping chocolate bars. I was supposed to get married that summer.”
She twisted her hands in her lap. This was distressing for her, he knew. The last thing he wanted was to cause this woman pain, and he was doing just that.
