Past Lives (16 page)

“As the previous example was not enough to keep you all loyal servants to the Fatherland, perhaps a stronger one will,” he said, waving three solders over to line up in front of us. When they pulled out their handguns, someone screamed.

“For the actions you have taken against this great nation, you will pay the ultimate price in death,” the Nazi announced. I watched as girls held each other close and boys stood alone, faces somber. I felt Sebastian reach for my hand, and I held onto it tight. Janika continued to stare into space, inviting death with quiet resolution.

“Shoot the Jew first,” he said, his voice bored. Before I even had a chance to cry out, a gun went off, and Janika crumbled to the ground at our feet.

“No!” I screamed, crumpling to my knees and holding her body to my chest. Warm blood poured to the ground and seeped through my black trousers, the smell of hot iron stinging my nostrils. It was so foreign, yet so familiar. Sebastian was right behind me, trying to tell me something, but my ears were fogged over from the sound of the gunshot, and I couldn’t make out the words. Through the piercing ringing in my ear, I could hear yelling as officers pulled Sebastian and me back up.

Not willing to look at the gun that would take my life head on, I kept my neck craned to look at Sebastian. We grasped each other’s hands again, holding on so tightly that the tips of my fingers turned white.

“I don’t understand why this had to happen to us,” he cried, a tear glistening down his cheek.

“I wish I knew,” I said. The last thing I remember is looking into his clear blue eyes, and feeling an odd sense of peace, grateful to know that I had loved, before the gun went off again.

And the world turned to darkness.

Part Four—New Hampshire, United States

21st Century Millennium

Chapter Twenty

A Fresh Start

If you’re a human being and you’ve been alive for a suitable amount of time, you’ve probably heard the phrase
everything happens for a reason.
People say it when they don’t understand the hardships of the human experience, and it soothes us through the toughest of times. Now, as we’ve just seen, I would eventually come to realize exactly
why
things were happening to me. But we’ll get to that soon.

I was born in Africa, the child of two benevolent doctors working for Doctors Without Borders. My mother focused primarily on women’s health, and my father was a surgeon. I don’t have many memories of Africa. I was three years old when my mother died. We never truly knew what virus she had contracted, as her body withered away suddenly and without warning. She died a few days after the virus took hold, leaving my father alone with a small child in a foreign land.

Not knowing what to do, he flew us back to his hometown in the New Hampshire North Country, population 3,412. He picked up a job as a rural physician and never looked back or talked about my mother again. Knowing what I know now, I really hope that I get to actually meet her in another life. It was only due to a visit to my grandmother’s house in Florida one year that I was even told what had happened to her.

All things considered, my childhood was blissfully and painfully normal. Growing up in the woods of New Hampshire, my dad provided me with the perfect American upbringing—ice cream and hot dogs on the 4
th
of July, a roast turkey for Thanksgiving and Christmas, and trick or treating each year in the center of town dressed as a pumpkin, a witch, or a princess. We would drive into Boston for Red Sox games and cringe every time they lost, convinced that someday the curse would be broken and the World Series would be ours. I played soccer from the time I was four until high school and knew no one outside of our little town.

Dad’s profession granted him everyone’s immediate respect, and I was never bullied or treated poorly. Life revolved around school starting, winter break, spring semester, and summer. Over and over, we relived the cycle as we grew and developed into the citizens we would become. The downside of this lifestyle is that it is incredibly boring. There’s not much entertainment out in the countryside, so if you weren’t into sports or part of a club, you were a druggie. For some, drugs passed the time just as well as anything else.

I grew up with the ingrained knowledge that I would enter the medical field. With two physician parents, there really was no other option…family business and all that. When I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I ignored the usual childlike answers like movie star or astronaut and answered
doctor
, as I had been told. When my father couldn’t find anyone to watch me, I would read or color quietly in the hospital waiting room, which if you ask me was the most interesting part of my childhood. Nothing is more fascinating than the way people behave when they believe they may never see a loved one again. It’s what inspired me to candy stripe at 17, working with the nurses in physical therapy.

I say “working” loosely, as it was my job to empty out bedpans or provide a good conversation to those who were too weak or too sick to leave the confines of our white walls and steel bedframes. I learned a lot from the dying. I learned a lot from people who had lost limbs, who cried out in the night when they couldn’t scratch an invisible itch on a toe that no longer existed. I learned not to take anything for granted, and though that lesson fades so easily with time, the constant reminders I surrounded myself with kept me vigilant.

I was sitting in the hospital waiting room reading from a textbook when my phone buzzed across the table. Glancing at the name, I was quick to tap the Answer key.

“Hey Giselle,” I whispered, though I was completely alone. Spring colds had just come to an end, and the warm breeze had kept the general public away, even for a brief time. In spite of the lack of a crowd, I was always allowed to hang out in the back offices. My dad was the head physician, after all.

“Hey, where are you?”

I rolled my eyes. Where was I always?

“The hospital.”

“I think we need to get you out of there as soon as possible. Who chooses to be trapped in a sterile room when the weather’s finally turned nice?” she asked, her common incredulity at my affection for the hospital a consistent part of our opening conversation. I smiled.

“People who have a final on Tuesday that they can’t botch,” I answered wryly. I heard her snort.

“You haven’t gotten less than 100% on anything in your entire life. I’m sure you already know the answers…come to the beach with me, please? I have news!”

I hesitated. As fun as the world outside was, I preferred my books, my hospital. Even as a child I felt weary, as though I had already travelled far and wide and simply wanted to stay put for once…which was completely irrational, because I’d never been anywhere but here. And I liked it that way.

Still, the plea in her voice won me over, as it almost always did. If it weren’t for Giselle, it was likely I would never go anywhere, and deep down I was grateful to her for that.

“Alright, I’ll head home and throw on my suit, see you in about 15.”

“Yes!” she cheered, clicking off the call before we had a chance to say a proper goodbye. Frankly, I was surprised she had even called…we’re a generation of texters and social media users, after all. Everyone was more likely to answer a tweet or a text than a phone call, but I was old fashioned. I liked to hear the sound of my friend’s voice, always cheerful in spite of the hardships of life.

Giselle came out to me a few years previous, as we were walking from the parking lot toward our school. It was surprisingly uneventful for me, though I know it was life changing for her. The conversation went something like this:

Giselle: So…you know I’m gay?

Me: I figured as much. I mean, you never talk about guys, and I’ve caught you checking out more than one lady at the beach. *smirk*

Giselle: So, that’s it? No questions or anything?

Me: Nope.

Giselle: Ok.

Me: Let’s get chocolate chip muffins at the café today.

And that was pretty much that. She hadn’t gathered the courage to tell anyone else, and it was a secret I was more than happy to keep until she felt brave enough to announce herself to the world. We knew of no other lesbians at our school, so her being the only one made the concept even more frightening. As I saw it, high school had two possibilities: you either fit in and had a great time, or you were an outcast sitting in wait, hoping college would be better. At the time, we were both happy members of the previous group, and wanted to keep it that way.

I drove my little silver Subaru home, a place I should have been much more comfortable with than I was. It was a whitewashed Victorian house, complete with a pointy-tipped tower and a wraparound porch. We owned about five acres of land, so the house sat quietly hidden amongst a forest of pines and birch. A brown rectangle of dirt stood vacant of plant life, a failed attempt at gardening from the previous summer. I had considered trying again but hadn’t found the time to plant.

The inside of the house displayed dark beams along the ceiling and boldly colored walls. My father preferred masculine furniture, so everything was heavily dark; our living room sported leather couches, the kitchen stainless steel and marble. A portly, charcoal black woodstove sat along a far wall, our main source of heat during the frigid months of winter. The red brick floor beneath it was smattered with black ash and bits of wood, reminding me that I was late in cleaning it out.

I took our wooden steps two at a time, sprinting to my room in the tower and pulling a black bikini from the top drawer of an old antique dresser. I slid it on, taking a second to check that the stubble on my legs wasn’t too prominent. Deciding I was sufficiently shaved, I threw my long brown hair back in a sloppy bun, catching one last glance at myself in the mirror.

I had been told that I had my mother’s eyes—green, with small flecks of brown. Playing soccer had provided me with a lean frame, though it couldn’t hide the natural curves that had arrived shortly after puberty. I tossed on a beach dress and flip-flops before plopping into my car and turning my iPod to our favorite driving mix. When I pulled up in front of her house, Giselle was already slamming her screen door and jogging down the front steps. She had chosen a short pair of yellow beach shorts and a white tank, her pink swimsuit peeking out from beneath the thin fabric. People often told me that Giselle and I could have been sisters because we looked so much alike. As with most people who are told that, we couldn’t see it, but we thanked them anyway.

“Oooh, I love this song!” she said, strapping herself in and reaching to turn it up. “Let’s hit it!”

I pulled the car out onto our one main road, guiding us to the highway that eventually led to the beach. We sang loudly with the music, and I cringed as Giselle sang off key. I allowed myself to forget the song, resting my arm out the window, my fingers toying with the wind that rushed in my ears. The heat of the warming sun danced along my skin, the burning sensation a welcome change from the freeze of the past six months. I realized that I was smiling without meaning to, and I laughed at nothing in particular. Giselle turned the music down, speaking loudly over the breeze.

“So, don’t you want to know my gossip?” she said, her eyes dancing with the eagerness to share. She began to wriggle around in her seat as though she would explode if she held the information in any longer.

“Of course I do!” I encouraged, trying to hide my amusement and failing.

“A new family is moving to town,” she announced breathlessly. She then stared at me in anticipation, waiting for a reaction. I raised my eyebrows. When she continued to stare, I laughed.

“And?”

Giselle huffed.

“And one of them is a
boy
. My mom just closed the deal on that house on Elm Street. She said it’s a single dad with two kids and I guess the cousin lives with them too. A guy and two girls…if we date them we can be related!”

“You realize there are a lot of reasons that logic can’t work, right?” I asked, realizing that she had already created a daydream out of this that would be hard to shake. She shrugged.

“Apparently the
guy is a decorated general, lived almost his entire life on base camps in the Middle East. The mom died, though he didn’t say how, and the cousin lives with them because her parents were killed too. Can you imagine?”

“I can’t,” I sighed, casting my gaze briefly out the window at the blur of trees. They were growing thinner as we approached the seacoast, replaced by musty swampland. As I stared out at the long, open road, I allowed myself to wonder for just a minute what new company would mean for our tiny little town. Although I had gone on many dates with the boys we knew, none of them had provided that spark, and the concept of a stranger coming and sweeping me off my feet had crossed my mind more than once in the quiet hours of the night. Still, I considered myself a realist. The chances of that ever happening were slim to none.

After we parked the car and set up our towels, we dipped our toes into the ice cold Atlantic before deciding a tanning session would be our best bet. As I lay in the sun, the heat seeping into pale skin untouched by air since last summer, I allowed myself to wonder just who would be joining us.

And what if?

Chapter Twenty
-
One

New In Town

It was a hot day in July, just after the strawberry festival. I remember it well because the waiting room was warmly decorated with large plastic fruit, green vines wrapping their way around bland, beige lamps. I was typing up notes for our head physical therapist, Dolly. She had been kind enough to take me under her wing, and under her tutelage I was given the chance to gain actual knowledge beyond photocopies and bedpans. I would do anything for Dolly.

The electric door whirred open, and a decorated military man wheeled in a younger man who had to be his son. The elder gentleman wore a blue coat that was plastered with tiny metals and patches, as decorated as a Christmas tree. His hair was raven black, the shade of his skin falling somewhere between olive and mocha. It was the set of his eyes and the stern expression of his lips that were identical to the boy in the chair. I slid back so that I was hidden behind the wall. One of the secretaries glanced up, waiting patiently for the pair to make their way over.

I snuck another look out the protective glass at the boy in the wheelchair. He wore black sweatpants and sneakers, a plain white t-shirt and a New Orleans Pelicans baseball cap. I took in his face—the long, dark eyelashes shading what looked like deep brown eyes, though it was hard to tell from behind the glass. He was muscular in a way that suggested he was also militarily trained, though the wheelchair contradicted that. I felt the back of my neck tingle with something familiar, and I allowed a tremor to weave its way down my spine.

“J,” Dolly had stuck her head in the door to the main office. I started and blushed as I swiveled in my office chair to face her. She lifted a single ginger brow.

“Can you come help me with a patient? I could use an extra set of hands.”

I nodded and quickly rose to join her. It took everything I had not to glance back over my shoulder, and I wondered idly if that was the new family that Giselle had been in such a tizzy about. When I had finished up with Dolly and it was time to head home, I glanced around the hallways briefly before exiting. No one was there.

***

A week passed by uneventfully, and before I knew it the school year was due to start in just a few short weeks. The heavy heat of July gave way to a cooler, wistful August. I always thought of August as a melancholy month, a nostalgia seeping into the trees that had had a good run, and were now preparing for a resplendent show of color before falling into winter’s sleep. The days seemed to stretch out languidly even as they grew shorter, and I often found my eyes drifting to an invisible horizon, looking for something that had no name.

The cool air of the waiting room caressed my face as I made my way back into the hospital, where I changed into my volunteer scrubs and prepared for whatever random task would be handed to me. My thoughts travelled along a wandering path as I strolled down the hallway, not noticing one of the hall tables jutting out further than usual. It collided neatly with my right knee.

“Ow!” I hissed, watching as the small gray table toppled onto its side, spilling magazines from 2008 all over the hallway. Rubbing the painful throb, I hunched for a moment to collect myself before cleaning up my mess.

“They really should just rid the world of side tables altogether. I know far too many people who suffer from table bump disease.”

I glanced up into the eyes of the boy in the wheelchair, who was smirking down at me. He bent to the side of his chair, his long arms reaching the magazines on the floor easily, and he began to pile them on his lap. I continued to stare.

“You’re not here as a patient, are you? Otherwise I’m afraid your escape has been foiled—sorry,” he said, his gentle smile still in place. His comment startled me back to reality and I stood, testing out my leg’s ability to keep me upright. Somehow, I thought wryly, I would recover.

“I volunteer here…here let me take those,” I mumbled, reaching for the magazines in his lap. He held them out to me obediently, but as our fingers brushed in the exchange our hands froze in place. We stared dumbfounded at one another, like we were expecting fireworks or something. The muted steps of a nurse coming down the hallway jarred me back into reality, and I pulled the magazines away, bending to straighten the table and set everything to rights.

“Um, can I help you with anything while I’m here?” I asked, unsure if I would even be allowed to follow through with that request. His eyes were slightly dazed before they shifted back to me.

“I’m heading to physical therapy…can you show me the way?” he asked, his head tilted at an adorable angle, like a puppy. I wanted to snuggle him. Of course, that would be a wee bit inappropriate, so instead I simply nodded and indicated which way we should go. We made our way slowly and silently, the fear of awkwardness pressing me into conversation.

“So, you never told me your name. I think I should know since you rescued me from certain doom,” I joked, and felt a warm sensation pulse through me when he rewarded me with a short laugh.

“Hardly a suitable rescue, but maybe someday I’ll be able to save you properly. I’m Sebastian.”

I blinked. Sebastian…I knew that name. Or maybe I didn’t. He looked up at me, waiting for me to introduce myself.

“I’m J,” I said, wondering if I should hold out my hand for him to shake. As we were already in motion on our way to physical therapy, I decided against it.

“It’s nice to meet you, J. Forgive me, but you look a little young to be rocking the hospital rotation,” he said, the open question dangling.

“I’ll be a senior in high school this year. This experience is meant to put me at the front of the candidate list for pre-med.”

“That’s very ambitious of you,” he said, and I blushed at how impressed he sounded.

“Well, what about you?” I asked. His eyes shaded over, as if he had forgotten for a moment why he was at the hospital, in a chair. We arrived at the door for physical therapy, and I stopped, still waiting for his answer. He rubbed his eyes with the fore and middle finger of his right hand.

“What about me…” he trailed off. “I’ll have to get back to you on that…at present I’m not really sure who I am anymore.”

I nodded and bid him farewell, heading back to my original route in search of Dolly and some busy work to keep my mind off of how I felt just looking at him. It was though I had already lost something, and desperately wanted it back.

And only he could give me whatever it was.

***

The next day I was approached by Dolly before I even had time to sit in my usual corner for data entry.

“You seem to have made quite an impression,” she said, her smile reaching her ears. I quirked my head and waited for her to elaborate.

“Sebastian would like you to join us for his physical therapy session today. He said, and I quote, ‘I think I can go farther if I have someone I’d like to get to.’ Do you have any idea what that means?”

I shook my head, bewildered, but not unpleased. There was so much more I wanted to know, and with school starting soon I would have my time at the hospital considerably cut short.

“Well, come on then,” she said waving me out of my chair. I rose and followed her to the physical therapy gym, where patients who had lost pieces of themselves tried to put their lives back together again. After the Boston marathon bombing, we had been swarmed with runners missing a foot here, a leg there. The problem wasn’t so much being able to walk as it was coming to terms with never being able to feel sand between your toes again. When Dolly opened the door, I was surprised to find Sebastian already there waiting for us. When he saw me, the cloud in his eyes lifted, and he flashed a smile of perfectly aligned white teeth.

“Ah, so glad you could join us,” he said grandly, as though he were the Great Gatsby and I had been invited to his elaborate party. I resisted the urge to curtsey, which was ridiculous. When was the last time anyone had curtseyed? I greeted him as professionally as possible and waited for Dolly to go over his training schedule for the day.

“We’ll have you do some stretches first with me, get your legs all warmed up and ready to go, and then we’ll have you on the bars to practice walking—sound good?”

I hung back while Dolly helped Sebastian out of his chair and onto a padded floor. Together they stretched, her holding his legs at certain angles, him wincing at the pain of reawakening muscles that had been unused for too long. Not knowing what to do and trying not to stare, I began to organize the equipment, which was entirely unnecessary because it was already in perfect order.

“Don’t you want to know what happened to me?” Sebastian called over, giving me a reason to join them without being awkward. I put down an elastic workout band and plopped down on a blue sofa.

“I wouldn’t want to pry…” I hesitated. He had closed down so quickly when I asked about him the day before that I was scared he would cut me out altogether if I tried again. The fact that he was inviting me in sent a tingle through me that I didn’t want to acknowledge. His smirk was bitter.

“Might as well tell you anyway. After all, you all are the ones in charge of my recovery right? It’s not like the General would want to talk about it…he’s been afraid to look at me since it happened. I think deep down he blames himself, which is stupid.”

I leaned in and put my elbows on my knees, at full attention. We learned very early on that when someone started talking on our watch it was because they needed someone to listen—needed to unload. I waited patiently for Sebastian to unweave his web and start the healing process, however long it would take. He sighed deeply, hissing in his breath as Dolly deepened the stretch across his leg. He then looked up at me, and I saw the weight of the world in his eyes.

“I was able to graduate high school early so that I could enlist in the Army, just like my father, his brother, and their father before them. We fight wars. It’s the family business.”

Dolly turned him to the side, pretzeling his body in a different direction. Sebastian ran his hand through his hair, and I watched black tendrils twine and toss between his large fingers.

“My mother was a beautiful woman from Qatar. My father fell in love with her almost instantly, though her family did everything they could to keep them apart. My dad is half Columbian, so he already knew what it was like to deal with a protective family—the people we know down there are very tight-knit,” he explained. I imagined a young woman, her head covered in a headdress, her beauty shining out from underneath, falling in love with the dashing foreigner in his uniform. Sebastian cast his gaze to the ground, his memories playing out.

“After 9/11 we were eventually all transferred to Afghanistan to stem the Taliban flow there. My sister, cousin and I never saw a day off the base. Part of me didn’t believe it when they told us it was too dangerous. I didn’t believe them until my mother left to try her hand at the local market and was murdered in cold blood. Not even a month later my uncle was taken by a landmine, his car blown right off the road.”

I wrapped my arms around my middle and rubbed my hands along their length. It was a strange time to be alive, where America was in the middle of a war that we knew so little about. Our soldiers were dying, but often most people didn’t really know why. We were told it was to stop the terrorists, and that was all. Being seventeen, I had tried to focus on my small life in my own corner of the world, mostly because I knew what it was like outside of my bubble. And I liked it better inside. Sebastian continued, though his eyes glistened and he had to clear his throat.

“By then I was filled with hate so deep it kept me up for days on end. The bitter taste of my mother’s death poisoned my food. I barely ate, preferring to fast on water as some kind of sacrifice to her. I graduated early so that I could be enlisted and handed a gun—I needed to kill the bastards who had taken my family from me. I had to protect my sister.”

Tears were falling freely now as he unleashed the burden he had been carrying. I wondered if we were the first ones to hear his story. Generally, men were looked down upon for showing emotion, though that seemed to be changing slightly with our generation. Still, I could feel his shame in weeping, though he could not stop himself. I fought the urge to rush to his side, to hold him until the pain melted away and he knew he could be safe here, with us. Instead, I pinned my arms firmly in place. Dolly pulled a tissue from a small pack in her pocket—always prepared.

“I trained hard, fighting to be the top of my unit. We were stripped of ourselves and turned into soldiers, killing machines. When I first went out, I couldn’t tell if I was more scared or furious—all I could feel was adrenaline pumping through me, begging for an outlet. We were attacked a few weeks into active duty…I looked into the eyes of so many men, before I killed them. When you’re in the heat of battle, you just don’t think about what it is to take a life…you do it because you must, and because you’ve had it beaten into you. It was only a month before I took a bullet that grazed my spine and took out my legs.”

Ah, so that brings us to here, I thought. As he spoke of his time serving in the military, his tears had dissolved, his body grew tense, and Dolly had to remind him to relax his muscles more than once. He listened without looking at her, because his eyes were locked on mine, and they begged me to understand. I didn’t blink. Something in me did understand. Although I had always been terrified of guns, I had shot a BB gun once and hit the target dead on, like I had been trained. Although I had a good laugh about it with my friends, I didn’t pick it up again.

Sebastian sighed, releasing me from the death grip of his stare. He tilted back his neck and rubbed it with his hand, massaging the tension from his shoulders. I knew that for now, his story was done.

“That’s quite a lot to go through in just 18 years,” Dolly commented, laying both his legs out straight.

“That’s the understatement of the century,” I said, and to my relief, Sebastian laughed. Still, his smile never quite reached his eyes, and I realized that he was far more broken than I could have ever imagined. I wondered if he would ever close his eyes without fear. Without images of war pasted to the back of his lids.