From the Indie Side (21 page)

But my heart. God, my heart.

“You made it too real,” I tell him.

Sinclair is leaning over my bed, and his eyes
are full of excitement. He’s just bubbling over with excitement.
His dark hair is tied back, and his glasses are smudged. “It has to
be real,” he says, laughter in his voice. And by God, he just has
no idea. No idea how awful this is.

“It’s too real,” I say again.

“The idea is to experience life and love and
family. That’s what it’s all about. It has to be real.”

I shake my head. He guides a cup of water to
my hand and I take a few sips, pass it back to him, then let my
head drop to the pillow. “My heart is breaking,” I whisper. “It’s
breaking.”

“You’ll get over it,” he tells me, talking as
if he knows about love.

“I don’t think I will. I don’t think a person
can get over something like this. To have loved them. My family.
And now she’s out there, with no memory of me. And our children. I
can’t bear to think that they never really existed. Did they?” I
press the heels of my hands to my eyes, then look up. “Did they?
I’m so confused.”

“No, they never lived.” He grabs a stool with
wheels and pulls it close while perching on it. He’s thinking.

“What if I can make you forget? That would be
easy. Just a little tweak to the memory center of your brain. I can
hit it with my eyes closed. The sweet spot. I’ll just erase your
little vacation. Your little trip to paradise.” And now he’s
getting excited again. And I’m thinking he really needs to go over
there himself so he’ll understand, so this will be more than just a
game to him.

“Erase my children?” I say. “I can’t believe
you even suggested that.”

He doesn’t get it. I can see it in his face.
But Sinclair is all about solving problems. “Will you still be my
beta tester? I can send you over again. I can send you over as many
times as you want.”

It’s tempting. God, how tempting. But I think
about Lila. I think about how she kind of knew me, kind of
recognized me. What would more visits do to her? And me. What about
me? How many times could my heart break?

“No. That’s a bad idea,” I say. “A really bad
idea.”

Sinclair looks disappointed. He fumbles in
his lab coat for a cigarette. He lights it with a Zippo lighter,
snapping the metal closed with a satisfied click. I’ve seen this
display hundreds of times, and I still don’t know if it’s
affectation or habit.

“But I wouldn’t mind going back sometimes,” I
say. “To see her. Not talk to her. Not marry her. Nothing like
that. Just see her. From a distance.”

Sinclair blows a cloud of smoke at the
ceiling. “I can do that,” he says. But I can tell he’s
disappointed. I’m his beta tester.

“Don’t touch me!” The pale boy shouts and
jumps back, arms held high. “You can’t touch me!”

“Who are you? Are you from the future? Are
you from another planet?”

I ask this because he’s come into the café so
many times now
. For months and months
. He always orders the
same thing, a chocolate-chip cookie and a latte. And he sits in the
corner and pretends to write, but whenever I look up I see him
watching me. And yet he never does anything but order his cookie
and his latte. So today I followed him out of the café. I ran after
him, stopping him before he’d gone a block.

And now he laughs at me—at my comment about
the future, I suppose. It is silly of me, but I feel I know him.
Why do I feel I know him?

“I’m not from the future,” he says. The sun
is bright, and his brown eyes look like they have glitter in them.
“I’m not from another planet, but I can’t explain where I’m
from.”

“Do you live around here?” I ask, all the
while aware that I’ve left the café, and that I need to go back.
For a moment I lost track of where I was—a little town in
Louisiana. And the season—fall.

“Yes.”

“Nearby?”

“Yes.” He suddenly looks sad. “I won’t be
coming back to the café,” he says, as if he’s just now, at this
very minute, come to that decision.

Now
I
am sad. I don’t know why, but I
will miss him. I’m sorry I ran after him. I’m sorry I scared him
away.

“Forget about me,” he tells me.

What an odd thing to say. As if we’ve had a
relationship. “I’ve known you before, haven’t I?” I ask.

“You weren’t supposed to remember. Sinclair
said you wouldn’t remember.”

“Remember what?” The very word
remember
causes a click deep in my brain, and I find myself
grasping for a faint dream that slips away before I can see the
edge of it.

“Nothing.” His voice kind of breaks.

I lean a bit closer. “Touch me.”

“I can’t.”

“You want to.” I can tell. I lift my arm. I
stretch my fingers toward him, a temptation. He does the same,
until our fingertips are inches apart. I feel a spark jump between
them, and for a moment I smell moss and river water. I hear a flute
playing in the distance.

His fingers curl into a fist, and his arm
drops to his side. “Be happy,” he tells me. And then he turns and
runs.

* *
*

Over the years, I catch glimpses of the pale
boy. Always, it seems, at some important event in my life. And
always watching me from afar. His strange presence no longer alarms
me, as unexplainable as it is.

And today, in fact, his presence in the back
pew of the church brings me a sense of comfort. And even though the
distance of the church separates us, and even though my
husband-to-be stands in front of me, I can feel the softness of the
pale boy’s hair against my cheek, and I can smell soil and brackish
water. I can taste red wine that hints of cork and moss.

And suddenly I imagine the pale boy standing
in a road, and I’m inside a car, someone I love beside me, behind
the wheel. A young girl. The pale boy is older, but still
beautiful.

I’ve known him. Somewhere. Somehow. He loved
me, and I loved him. And we stood at an altar together just like
this.

Just
like this. I’m so confused. For a
moment, I forget about a man named Walter who is looking at me with
expectant and puzzled eyes, a ring between his fingers. He is
suddenly much less important than the pale boy.

A waking dream.

How can a dream seem more real than real
life? How can a dream hurt in this way? How can a dream bring with
it so much love?

The minister makes a small sound in his
throat. He asks me again if I take the man across from me to be my
lawfully wedded husband.

“I do,” I whisper. How can I stop the
ceremony? How can I say I love someone else? A pale boy from a
dream?

The minister pronounces us husband and wife,
and when we turn to face the congregation, I scan the crowd with
something like panic, looking for him. The pale boy. The man on the
bike. The man in the road. The man who leaned in the car and
whispered that he loved me.

“See you at home,” I’d said, waving as the
car pulled away.
See you at home.
And then I remember him on
the floor of the café where I’d worked… how many years ago? Ten?
Holding my hand so tightly. Holding my hand as if he never wanted
to let go.

* *
*

Years pass, and I continue to see him. He is
there when both my son and daughter are born. Both times I awaken
to find him standing in my hospital room. One blink, and he is
gone. He is there as I grow old, and he is there at my husband’s
funeral, held in the same church where we were married. And he is
there at the very end.

“I know you,” I whisper from my bed as I feel
life slipping away. He doesn’t look any different. But I am old. My
daughter has gone downstairs to get a cup of coffee, and my son is
asleep in another room.

“Yes,” the pale boy says.

“You love me,” I tell him.

“Yes.”

“You’ve loved me for a long time.”

He nods, presses his lips together, and bows
his head.

“I used to think it was a recurring dream,
but I finally realized that somehow we shared a life.”

He looks up, stricken. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. How many people get the
chance to live more than one life? You gave me a gift. And love.
Who can be sorry about love? Maybe love is the only thing that
never really dies.”

My feet are heavy as I move down the
sidewalk. I’m heading for the coffee shop because I promised
Sinclair I would go there one more time. He’s been after me for
months, and I keep putting him off. And he just keeps bugging me.
Me, a grieving man.

But I’m his beta tester.

The bell above the door rings and I move
reluctantly toward the counter. A young girl turns around. Her hair
is bright blue, and her wrists are wrapped in black leather
bracelets. She’s wearing a purple skirt with black tights and black
boots. She smiles at me and asks if she can take my order.

Lila.

Her hair is a different color, and her
clothes are different (I must tell Sinclair about the changing hair
and clothing), but it’s Lila.

I think I answer, because she nods and jots
something down on a pad of paper. And before I know it, I’m
reaching into my pocket. I’m pulling out a business card.

Sinclair has perfected the cards, three
different cards for three different types of journeys. The card I
pass to her is a fairly close replication of the original, the one
that brought her to me all those visits ago. I don’t know how
Sinclair has done it, and I understand that this is a repeat of
that very first day. He’s somehow bent time. He’s somehow brought
her back so that I can relive this day, as often as I dare.

“For the jar,” I tell her, motioning to the
glass fishbowl.

She smiles and takes the card. She holds it
in both hands, and she stares at the fire. She turns it over, and
the magic happens.

I’m suddenly standing on the edge of the
island, and Lila is rowing across the river, coming toward me.

Thank you, Sinclair.

I watch as she drags the boat to shore. I
watch as she fumbles in the dark. And I know I will never tire of
this moment, this day, even if I relive it a thousand and one
times. I step out of the shadows and say, “You came.”

“Made of Stars” began at a timed writing
party. We set the timer for an hour. With no previous thought as to
what I would write, I let the story unfold and surprised myself by
writing the first chapter of “Made of Stars,” which I called “The
Pale Boy.” At that time I considered it complete. I put it online
and people loved it, so at the next timed writing party (a year
later) I continued with the story and ended up with “Made of
Stars.”

Anne Frasier (a.k.a. Theresa Weir) is a
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestselling author of
twenty-five books and numerous short stories that have spanned the
genres of suspense, mystery, thriller, romantic suspense,
paranormal, fantasy, and memoir. During her award-winning career,
she’s written for Penguin Putnam, Simon & Schuster,
HarperCollins Publishers, Bantam Books/Random House, Silhouette
Books, Grand Central Publishing/Hachette, and Amazon’s Thomas &
Mercer. Her titles have been printed in both hardcover and
paperback and translated into twenty languages.

Her first memoir,
The Orchard
(Theresa
Weir), was a 2011
Oprah Magazine
Fall Pick, Number Two on
the Indie Next list, a featured B+ review in
Entertainment
Weekly
, and a Librarians’ Best Books of 2011. Her second memoir
(
The Man Who Left
), which she self-published, hit the
New
York Times
bestseller list. Other self-published titles include
Girl with the Cat Tattoo
(Theresa Weir) and
Geek with the
Cat Tattoo
from her acclaimed Cool Cats series. These stories
are romances told partially from a cat’s point of view.

Anne is currently working on the third book
in the Elise Sandburg crime-fiction series (
Play Dead
and
Stay Dead
) featuring a Savannah homicide detective who can’t
shake the dark heritage left by her famous conjurer father.

Website:
www.annefrasier.com

Facebook: Anne Frasier / Theresa Weir
(
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Anne-Frasier-Theresa-Weir/224483720951255?ref=hl
)

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