I do. He leans closer, his shoulder touching mine. I try not to notice the solid granite feel of it, the warmth emanating from his bare skin. He draws his index finger down the page and then stops midway. “OK, this paragraph. Start here.”
Recurring dreams containing historic details—horses and carriages, rotary phones, suits of armor or even people you’ve never met before—could be indicative of past lives. Some people who’ve experienced these dreams believe they’re learning about important events that were formative in a former life, or people that were meaningful to them.
One of the most famous cases of this is Salvador Dalí, who believed he was St. John of the Cross, a reformer from the sixteenth century, reincarnated. Not only did Dalí claim to recall the dark nights in a prison cell and beatings St. John was subjected to in his life, he also experienced a vivid dream—a living image of Christ on the cross. Interestingly, it was the same vision that appeared to St. John at his monastery in Ávila. Dalí translated this dream into a painting, Christ of Saint John of the Cross.
I look up at Oliver. “This is the least far-out stuff?”
He grins.
“So you think we’re dreaming of a past life in which we knew each other. And went to a carnival.”
He laughs. “For the record, I did not say that. Krynchenko did.”
“Noted,” I say, and then pause. “But what do you think?”
“That it’s weird. But this whole thing is weird, so what do I know?” He looks at me. “What about you? You asked me, but you never said—do you believe in all that psychic stuff?”
“Heh.” My breath catches, thinking of Isak. “I actually went to see one. Recently.”
I didn’t plan to say it, it just came tumbling out, and I’m nearly as surprised as he looks when he says, “You did?”
I shift uncomfortably on the bench. “Yeah.”
“About this?”
“Kind of. I mean, I really went more for fun, I think? But then he brought it up. Said I’d been dreaming about a man, and he described you. Well, he described a man with brown eyes and brown hair, which really could have been anybody.”
Oliver sits back. “Huh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, what else did he say?”
I swallow. Look at the ground, cursing myself for bringing it up in the first place. I mumble a response.
“What?” Oliver leans closer.
I clear my throat. “He said you were going to give me a baby.”
“What?” He jerks his head back and chuckles nervously. And though I’m too embarrassed to look at him head-on, I can see him out of the corner of my eye stuffing his fingers through his hair. He’s flustered, his patina of confidence momentarily shattered. It occurs to me he rarely is. Rattled. Embarrassed. Vulnerable. If I were a bad wife, I would find it ridiculously attractive.
I’m a bad wife.
He recovers quickly. “The plot thickens,” he quips.
“Indeed.”
He half chuckles again, this time bent over, elbows resting on his knees, staring intently at the sidewalk that he’s casually scuffing with his sandaled foot. “Suppose Harrison might have something to say about that.”
I tense at the mention of my husband’s name. Both at the shaming reminder that I have a husband as I sit here with another man, and at the thought that Harrison has had something to say: He doesn’t want a baby. But Oliver doesn’t need to know any of that. I exhale long and slow.
“Yeah. Suppose he might.”
And suddenly, I’m aware more than ever of Oliver’s proximity. I shift my body slightly to the left on the bench, so our shoulders are no longer touching. And I search for something else to talk about. A subject change. I find it on the side of his face, at his hairline. “Hey—how’d you get that scar?”
“Huh?” He lifts his head, reaches up, rubbing it with his index finger, as if he’d forgotten it was there.
“Oh, got in a fight with a China cabinet,” he says. “We had this huge floor-to-ceiling one in the dining room. I was maybe three, four, and I got it in my head that I could scale it. I opened the drawers to climb up them like stairs, and my weight tipped it over. Whole thing completely fell over on top of me. Glass shattered, slicing up my scalp pretty good. Scared my mom something awful.”
“I bet,” I say. “You know, you don’t have it in my dreams. Or if you do, I’ve never noticed it before.”
“You don’t have that tattoo,” he says. I turn my wrist over, and we both stare at the three black characters.
“Do you think that means something?”
“Beats me,” he says. And I know exactly what he means—how each new theory only sounds more far-fetched than the one before, and each new revelation only serves to muddy the water instead of making things clearer.
The muted clanging of a bell rings out into the night—the large clock on the main plaza in town. I count eleven tones. “It’s late. I should probably be getting home.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Me, too. C’mon, I’ll walk you to your car.”
We stand up, and I offer the book to him. “You can keep it,” he says. “It just gets crazier.”
I tuck it in the crook of my elbow and we begin retracing our steps. “I was sorry to hear about your mom,” I say. His mentioning her jogged my memory of Caroline saying she died. He bobs his head. “How old were you?”
“Thirteen.”
“That must have been hard.”
He makes a soft grunting sound. “If there’s a word that encompasses what it was, I have yet to find it in my life.”
I don’t know what to say to that—sorry seems utterly useless, and I’ve already said it, anyway—so I let the words hang in silence. We pass the coffee shop and turn onto Mechanic.
“So what’s your tattoo mean?”
I think of Harrison, and when I got it—and my stomach twists with a mix of guilt and longing. “It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time,” Oliver says, catching me by the wrist, stopping me in my tracks. It’s the first time he’s touched me on purpose tonight and I know it because of the way it takes my breath, the way I’m fully aware of the pad of his thumb resting on the black characters of my tattoo, on my ulnar artery. I wonder if he can feel the uptick of my pulse. My eyes find his, and the way he’s looking at me is the way I feel—like we’re suddenly the only two people in the world.