*
He had been thinking more seriously about karma lately. He had never focused on it in his work—it was hard enough to find verification that consciousness continued, without getting mixed up in the complexity of ethical ramifications across time—but occasionally he had run searches of the data, trying to see if there was a connection between the kinds of lives people led and their next lives. There was nothing conclusive, although a small fraction of those in peaceful or affluent conditions remembered previous lives in which they’d meditated or behaved in a saintly way. He’d had his own thoughts lately, though, that ignorance and fear and anger, like trauma, could perhaps be transferred from one life to the next, and that it might take multiple lifetimes to overcome them. And if anger and fear could persist—then also, of course, stronger emotions could as well, such as love. Was that what drew some people back to reincarnate within their own families? Was that what caused some children to remember their past connections? And if so, then perhaps this phenomenon, these children’s memories he had studied so carefully, was not against the laws of nature, after all. Perhaps it was the foundational law of nature that they were proving, what he’d been documenting and analyzing for over thirty years without knowing it: the force of love. He shook his head. His brain was going soft, maybe.
Or maybe not. He’d kept so many of these questions at bay all these years, and now they whirled around him, touching him with something like awe, on their way to someplace else.
Thirty-Eight
Denise would never get over it. She knew that.
Tommy’s bones at the bottom of the well.
She and Henry had spent some time with those bones. When the police had finished testing and tagging and photographing them, the funeral parlor had given them time before the burial. She’d clutched them to her chest, run her fingertips along the smooth sockets that had held his shining eyes. There, but not there. Some part of her wanted those bones, wanted to put the femurs under her pillow at night when she went to sleep, to carry his skull around in her purse so she’d be with him always; she understood now how people went crazy and did crazy things. But another part of her knew that it wasn’t Tommy. He wasn’t there.
Tommy’s bones, where Noah had said he’d drowned; she supposed that was proof, if that’s what you were looking for, but she wasn’t looking. Somehow it had ceased to matter to her.
Yet how could it not matter whether this boy carried some little piece of Tommy deep inside of him? Some fragments of his love. Tommy’s love for her, surviving, inside of Noah. That was something, wasn’t it?
But surely we all carried some little piece of each other inside of us. So what did it matter, whether the memories belonging to her boy existed inside this other one? Why were we all hoarding love, stockpiling it, when it was all around us, moving in and out of us like the air, if only we could feel it?
She knew that most people couldn’t follow her where she’d gone. Would think, like Henry, that she’d gone off the deep end. How could anyone understand what she herself didn’t understand?
Her heart—something had happened to it. That’s what she would say, if she thought he could listen. She’d known it had been cracked for good. Shattered beyond repair. But she hadn’t counted on it cracking open.
She would never get over losing Tommy. She knew that.
Neither could she go back to the person she’d been. There was no resistance left, nothing held back, after a lifetime of holding back. She could feel every stray breeze penetrating to her core. It was terrifying, but there was nothing to be done. Her heart was cracked open now and the whole world could come on through.
*
Henry pulled her aside after the burial. The others were standing by their cars in the heat, giving the two of them a moment to grieve alone. They stood by the turned earth and scattered flowers, that surreal yet familiar tableau which called out, Believe it. Denise squinted her eyes in the sun at all the graves running in orderly rows and the trees arching over them. Trees and stones and earth and sky, as far as she could see.
Henry took her hand in his and she felt her skin jump with the relief of feeling his flesh against hers again. He squeezed her fingers and said, “I’m not coming to the house.” Everyone was gathering at her house for the reception after the funeral. She had hired a caterer. She felt too overwhelmed at the moment to handle Henry’s resistance. He had to come.
“Just for a little while, Henry. Please.”
He was holding her hand, but he was glowering. “I can’t stand to be in the same room with those people.”