Pieces of Hope (51 page)

The
fairgrounds were really crowded. I’d never been around this many people when I
travelled Somewhere, unless it was at the Station. We zigzagged through the
crowd, passing by booth after booth of carnival games.
 

“Who are
all these people?” I asked, slowing my step at the basketball toss.
 

Charlotte looked
teary-eyed. I got the idea that she’d chanced upon a family reunion and was a little
overwhelmed. “These are your forever friends, Hope—the same people you meet
again and again, lifetime after lifetime.”

“These
are all
my
friends?” There were
enough faces to fill McMinnville and then some. I was shocked. “But how do they
recognize me? Don’t I look different?”

Charlotte took an extra
second to answer. “Oh, I see,” she said, brightening as she finally understood.
“The outside is just a shell.” We walked past a boyfriend and girlfriend who
gave me a friendly smile. I grinned back at them.

“Charlotte, you know I
have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The
outside’s just a shell,” she repeated, more slowly this time. But I still
didn’t get it. “If I changed my clothes or dyed my hair, you’d still know it
was me, wouldn’t you?”

I nodded
a little.

“That’s
how they know it’s you,” she explained. “The outside may look different, but
your soul—who you really are—always stays the same.”

“Then
why don’t I recognize them?” I asked.
Rin
waved at a
black-haired boy who waved back at us enthusiastically. He was so persistent I
finally waved, too.

After
the boy had passed out of sight,
Rin
snapped, “Because
you’re not dead!” Then she folded her arms across her chest and turned her back
to me.

“You and
Cat ought to get together and take turns beating people up,” I suggested,
feeling slightly hurt and very annoyed. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Don’t
mind
Rin
,” Charlotte
said as we paused in front of a cheesy rock wall. “She didn’t think you were
going to make it back.”

“If
that’s true, then she should be happy—I’m going back!” I growled. But
Rin
still refused to turn around. It wasn’t a giant leap to
guess that there was more to her mood, but as usual, no one was talking.
  

I was
about to dig deeper when Charlotte
gushed, “Recognize it?”

She was
pointing at the thirty-foot rock wall with its varying sizes of plastic hand
and foot grips staggered along its surface. A memory from childhood flooded my
senses. I looked at my hands; I could see how much smaller they were back then.
And I could hear Mom and Dad cheering me on. I smiled at Charlotte.

“That’s
the first rock wall I ever climbed!” I muttered in disbelief. “I was ten. That
was also the year my adorable goat, Billy, won me my first blue ribbon.”
Rin
wrinkled her nose. Charlotte giggled. “I was so ecstatic about
winning that ribbon that I scaled that wall faster than Spiderman could have.
After that climb, I realized I had a serious addiction.”
    

“You
didn’t realize it,”
Rin
said a little too smugly.
“You remembered it.”

“
Rin
, don’t.” Charlotte
looked upset. “You shouldn’t say things like that.”

“No,
please—I remembered it?” There was a confused urgency in my voice. “Are you
saying that I climbed in that other lifetime?”

Charlotte ignored me,
scanning the crowd again in search of
Creesie
. A few
seconds later, she gave a frustrated sigh. “It looks like it’s going to be a
while . . .” I knew how bad it was when she suggested the same thing she had at
the beach in Bali. “Perhaps we should all take
a seat.”

First we
grabbed three bags of kettle corn from the vendor—the girl took a moment to ask
how I’d been; though I was polite, I still had no idea who she was—then we took
up Charlotte’s
suggestion. The back of the bench had a ferocious grizzly head carved into it,
its chunky arms resembling bear paws. It looked almost real. We sat a few feet
from the mulch-covered walkway where the crowd still marched, across from the
colliding scents of cotton candy, kettle corn, and corn dogs, and within sight
of the climbing wall. Just beyond the carnival games, an old-fashioned Ferris
wheel caught my eye. Though it was your average-sized wheel, nothing special
there, it shimmered in such a warm, golden, mesmerizing light that I couldn’t
look away.

Its
other unusual feature was its single wooden car, suspended in motion at the top
of the wheel, painted gold, same as the lights and the lap bar. I could just
make out the words carved in an archaic script on the seat back. It took a few
seconds to translate. Not because of the distance. Because of the letters. They
weren’t like any I’d ever seen before. Beware of the
 
. . . BEWARE OF THE FLASH . . . I finally deciphered,
thinking hard about what that might mean . . . Hmm . . . Pyrotechnics, maybe .
. . .?
   

The
groan of a little girl voice pulled me from my distraction. My mouth still full
of sticky-sweet corn, I twisted in Charlotte’s
direction. She was leaning forward on the bench, casting a gloomy look around
me, aiming it at
Rin
.

“Is
something wrong?” I asked, wondering what I’d missed in the last thirty
seconds.

Charlotte turned to me,
the gloom remaining. “You should prepare yourself, Hope. What I’m about to tell
you can be quite a shock to the system. Though it shouldn’t ever have been
mentioned by certain anonymous parties”—she avoided looking at
Rin
—“the answer is yes. Yes, you used to love to climb.”

I
quickly swallowed a huge lump of popcorn. “I knew it! And was I any good?”

“Oh, you
were better than good . . .” She bit her lip, seeming to want to hold back
something, then decided better of it. “Back in the forties, women were just starting
to become more independent, but you were way ahead of your time. Those women weren’t
one-tenth as adventurous as you were. Bit of a daredevil, really. Nothing was
off limits in your mind.”

“And you
knew me well?” It was impossible to contain my enthusiasm. Charlotte was about to tell me my life story,
and I hadn’t any idea what she was about to say next. In a rush, I asked, “Who
were my friends? Who were you? What was my name?”

“Your
name was Lucille King,” she said happily. “Everyone called you Lucy.”

“Ethan
was right! I can’t believe he remembered.” Then I grimaced.
Lucy?
Still, I could imagine
worse—Esther, Edith, Agatha . . .

Hearing
my thoughts,
Rin
snapped, “You didn’t like it much
then, either.”

“I
didn’t?” This surprised me. “Isn’t it amazing that I still think like that?”

Rin
looked as if she wanted to choke me. “Duh, not really.
You’re still you.”

I felt a
little out of sorts—as if I’d just conked my head and couldn’t get my thoughts
back in order. I looked at
Rin
. “I knew you, didn’t
I? And there’s a reason you’re still mad at me . . .”
Rin
flinched as I studied her, assembling what little pieces I could gather for a
clue. “Were we . . . friends?” I finally asked.

“That
would be a stretch,”
Rin
said harshly. “Sisters. We
were sisters.”

I
ignored the duality of her words. Sisters, but not friends? I supposed it
wasn’t all that uncommon. Look at Claire and me. We hadn’t been close in the
longest time. Maybe we never were. So,
Rin
and I were
distant in our earlier lifetime? Not so weird.

“Sisters?
Wow!” In truth, I’d hoped that Charlotte and I might have been sisters and I fought
to hide my disappointment. After all, the thought had crept into my mind that
one or more of us might be related. Besides, this new and angry
Rin
wasn’t furthering her cause for sisterhood.

“There’s
a reason I’m so angry!”
Rin
shouted, a tug on my
fingers announcing her intrusion.

“Then
say it!” I shouted back, ignoring my insides warning me to be cautious. “I’m
not going to die if you tell me!”

Rin’s
mouth dropped open, and I felt something sticky land
on my skin. I must have been waving my arms around when I was talking because
I’d spilled my kettle corn all over the seat. Standing shakily, I brushed the tacky
pieces off my clothes and the bench; Charlotte
helped with the smaller pieces. Then, tossing the container into a barrel that
reminded me to
Keep Somewhere Beautiful
,
I turned back to
Rin
and Charlotte, my eyes roaming
from one to the other.
Rin
—refusing to meet my gaze. And
Charlotte—resistant
to look at me. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why they were
acting this way.

“Somebody
has to tell me,” I said, focusing exclusively on Charlotte. Of the two, she was more likely to
cave. “Charlotte,
if you can’t do, let
Rin
. I can almost see it on the
tip of her tongue. She’s dying to tell me—if only to yell at me for something
that I did wrong.”

They
looked at each other, their eyes widened in shock.

“Sit
down, Hope,” Charlotte
said nervously. “And take a big breath.”

I did as
I was told. Charlotte
took several deep breaths as well before she spoke. I got the feeling she
didn’t think this was a stellar idea, but she could see no way around it.
Before she said a word, she narrowed her eyes at
Rin
.
No doubt to discourage
Rin
from opening her mouth and
disclosing more than Charlotte
wanted me to know.

“You and
I used to be best friends,” Charlotte
began, now looking calmly at me. “I couldn’t climb like you, but you didn’t
seem to mind. You accepted me for who I was and never made me feel different.
We were the same age, but you could say that I admired you.”

I
stopped biting my lip long enough to ask, “What was your name?”

“Albert
Kelley. You usually called me Kelley.”

“A boy?”
Even though Brody was my best friend in this lifetime (and that was a surprise
in itself) I almost couldn’t believe I had a male best friend in an earlier one
as well. “That’s some coincidence, isn’t it?”

Charlotte got the
reference. “Not really. Like
Rin
said, you’re still
you. People have a tendency to keep doing the same things over and over again.”

“Fascinating!”
I grabbed a handful of Charlotte’s
kettle corn and chewed, glancing once at
Rin
who was
busy glaring straight ahead. I asked Charlotte,
“How come Grumpy and me weren’t close?”

“You and
your sister had a . . . difficult relationship.” Charlotte couldn’t look at her as she said
it, but I guessed from the way
Rin
bristled that it
was true. “She was five years older, and in her mind, wiser, and she tried to .
. . well, guide you in a certain direction, but you were very independent, even
when you probably shouldn’t have been. You liked to do things your own way.
You—”

“Refused
to listen ever!”
Rin
finished. “Lucy did what Lucy
wanted to do and never once thought about consequences! I told you over and
over and over, who knows how many times—and you never listened!”

Almost
laughing, I asked her, “And why are you beating me up for something I don’t
remember that happened over seventy years ago? Isn’t there a statute of
limitations on these things?”

“No!”
Rin
shouted, startling me. “Because you nearly did it
again!”

Rin
, that’s enough!
Charlotte scolded.

To my
surprise, I took Charlotte’s
hands in mine and begged, “Please don’t keep this from me. Maybe telling me
could help me . . . I’m guessing that this thing I nearly did again is pretty
bad seeing as how I’ve almost died several times in the past . . . how many
days is it now?”

“Thirteen,”
Rin
growled.

I
gulped. Thirteen? Could I get more unlucky?

Charlotte’s resolve was
crumbling. She looked at
Rin
. “Maybe . . . maybe it’s
for the best. Maybe she would do something different next time . . .”

“Don’t
need to convince me,”
Rin
said stiffly, shifting
uncomfortably on the seat. “I wanted to tell her a long time ago, but nobody
would let me.”

Charlotte sighed, her
will defeated. “Cat would have let you.” Cat wanted to tell me? She was the
only person who was angrier at me than
Rin
.

“Why
don’t you start at the beginning?” I suggested before Charlotte changed her mind. “That way I can’t
get lost and ask you a bunch of stupid questions.” This seemed to satisfy
Rin
. She, evidently, thought I was going to do just that.

Charlotte scanned the
crowd again, but the group was still nowhere in sight. Just then a young girl
called out, “
Hiya
, Luce! How
ya
been?”

When I
didn’t answer fast enough,
Rin
jabbed me with a hard
elbow, and I waved back in mock enthusiasm.
Ow
! I mouthed at
Rin
. “Great! Nice to see you, too!” I said. I was amazed at
my ability to lie. Well, maybe not that amazed.

“I’m not
sure where the beginning actually is,” Charlotte
finally said.

“Why
don’t you start by telling her the three of them loved to climb?”
Rin
huffed.
 

Charlotte nodded back,
eyeing me with concern. “Fine, we’ll start there.”

“Three?”
I repeated, stunned. The significance of that number made me feel faint and
more than a little sick to my stomach. “You mean me, Ethan, and Daniel?” I slid
down on the bench as black dots danced before my eyes, my brain swirling like a
tornado had just hit it.