“When you passed the mirror,” Sophie said.
“Ye-ah. .” She was making me uneasy. “What is it?”
“Megan, the way you talked about your dreams, I thought you were seeing the future or tapping into your mother’s past. But maybe that’s not it. What if you’ve been remembering places and objects that you saw in your own past?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if you’re Avril-reincarnated?”
I pulled back. “Now you’re getting weird.”
“It makes sense,” she argued. “When you returned to your old house, you instinctively went to your old room. You put your clock back where you kept it. Since the mill was important to you, you noticed a painting of it that seemed out of place.”
“Are you saying I moved those things?”
“While you were sleepwalking,” Sophie replied. “It probably happened more than once.”
I shook my head.
“Avril died when she was a teen,” Sophie went on, “and that makes it all the more likely. Reincarnation is a chance to complete what’s unfinished in a previous life. For instance, if two lovers-”
“I’ve seen the movies and know what it is,” I said, cutting her off. “A woman gets hypnotized, then remembers bizarre stuff from another century. I’m just having dreams.”
“They’re the same thing,” she replied, “memories buried in the unconscious. They come out in different ways, that’s all. Sometimes when a person has experienced a tragic death, there is a symptom of it in the next life. Say a girl died in a fire. In her next life, just seeing a candle being lit might frighten her. Her phobia comes from a memory buried in the unconscious.”
“Well, I don’t have any phobias,” I told Sophie. “And besides, if Avril’s spirit was reincarnated, I don’t see how she could have a ghost.”
“Maybe there isn’t one.”
“I saw her with my own eyes!”
“In a mirror,” Sophie pointed out. “Maybe you had an outof-body experience and saw your own spirit. Which is what others have been seeing just before dawn. That, too, makes sense-living in a different time zone, your sleep cycle is later than ours.”
“No,” I insisted.
“Think about the night you saw the mist in the mirror. Do you remember at any point looking down on yourself, looking upon your body as it is now?”
My spine tingled. “At the very end l-l thought I saw myself lying dead.”
“Like the way people describe a near-death experience?”
she asked. “Like when someone whose heart has stopped sees himself lying on an operating room table?”
I nodded slowly.
“It’s an out-of-body experience.”
“Or a dream,” I replied stubbornly.
Sophie sighed and got up from the bench. “I’ve got to work. Talk to Miss Lydia. She’ll help you understand.”
I stood up. “There’s nothing to understand.”
She laid a hand on my arm. “Megan, listen to me.
Sometimes a premature death keeps you from doing the work you were meant to do. Sometimes it separates two people meant to be together. Reincarnation isn’t something to fear, it’s a second chance.”
“I never asked for a second chance.”
“Okay, let me put it this way. Do you want the dreams to stop?”
“I want it all to stop.”
“Then accept the possibility of reincarnation. Find out who you are and what you’re to do with your second chance.
Once you have, the past will let go of you.”
I didn’t know what to think. I wasn’t the kind to run away from something, and I certainly wanted the strange things that had been happening to end.
“See you tomorrow,” she said softly, then went inside.
I walked down High Street and sat for a long time by the water. I knew that Grandmother was more than cold to meshe was jealous. Matt seemed confused, torn between protecting her and defending the time he spent with me. I, for some crazy reason, actually cared about Grandmother.
And I was trying to overcome an attraction to Matt that I didn’t want to admit. The parallels between the past and present were eerie. Were the three of us playing out parts in a triangle that had existed sixty years ago?
I wasn’t ready to talk to Mrs. Riley Wednesday afternoon and didn’t ask Grandmother why she had gone to see her.
Obviously, she was feeling haunted. Questioning her would only make her more hostile toward me. That night I tossed and turned in bed. I discovered the one advantage to lack of sleep: lack of dreams. Still, my mind raced with thoughts as strange as dreams.
If Matt were Thomas, then he must have held me once, he must have kissed me. I quickly squelched that daydream.
According to Mrs. Riley, there were a lot of girls in Thomas’s life before he settled on Avril. It occurred to me that his love for Avril was not a proven fact. Mrs. Riley told me what she believed at the time, but for all she knew, Thomas may have been planning to break things off with Avril the night she had died. He and Avril might have had a terrible fight. Perhaps the negative feelings from that time had carried over; it sure seemed as if Matt had set his mind against me before we met.
By eight-fifteen Thursday evening I had spun so many theories in my head I didn’t know what I thought about Thomas and Avril. But my belief in the possibility that Matt and I had been reincarnated waned: The two of us meant for each other in a previous lifetime? No. He and I were nothing more than a pair of high school kids, cousins who occasionally got along, heading for a party. We set off in his Jeep to pick up Alex and Sophie.
“I hope Kristy won’t mind Sophie and me coming,” I said, when we stopped at a red light.
“She told us we could bring whoever we wanted,” Matt replied. “Which doesn’t mean she’ll be nice,” he added. “But you can handle her.”
“Of course I can,” I said, which made him laugh. “It’s Sophie I’m worried about.”
“I’ll look out for her,” he assured me.
We picked up Alex by the college.
“Stay where you are, Megan,” he told me as he climbed in the back. “It’s a short ride to Sophie’s.”