That wild hair was up in a bun and little flyaways framed her sweet face. She held a box in her lap but didn’t touch it, didn’t do much of anything but stare forward. Then she seemed to notice me and sat up straighter, which is when I caught a glimpse of the bottle of bourbon under her arm. Her face was drawn, her features tight with tension but she didn’t speak when I moved closer and sat, sharing a seat with her.
I nodded at the bottle, but kept my voice calm. “You feeling a little southern tonight?” She’d told me the first night about her granddaddy and his love of cigars and whiskey. I’d almost half expected to see her puffing on a stogie.
“A lot southern,” she said, drinking from the bottle without watching me.
“You’re not from the south, Will.” There was a small twitch on the left side of her mouth when I called her that. She’d smiled wide and happy the first night I'd used her pet name, like the sound of the endearment had made her all fuzzy-headed.
She set the bottle down next to her hip, steadying it with the crook of her elbow before she pushed the box on her lap toward me. “My folks stopped by yesterday. It’s been exactly two months since my great grandfather died and they wanted me to have this box. Dad thought it had been lost, all this… stuff…”
“What is it?”
She waited, licking her lips like she had cotton mouth before she answered. I wasn’t sure what to make of that expression. It was serious, a little worried. “Pictures, letters, rings he bent and twisted from silver dollars and pennies during the war when he was on watch.” She pulled one out of the box and slipped it on her pinky. It was old, dingy copper, splotched green, but Willow stared at it like it was a Tiffany diamond. I liked the look on her face, how, for a second it made me forget that I wanted her gone, that she’d walked away so easily.
“I remember you mentioning him dying.”
“Yeah, well, my folks thought I’d want this stuff. It’s all the things that meant the most to him, except maybe us.”
Her fingers were small, the nails short but trim and when she handed over a small black and white picture, my fingers grazed hers, lingering as I held the old photo with a little reverence. Not long ago, I’d kissed each finger, and let them run over my body, across my naked chest. There were no calluses, nothing that would take away her softness, nothing that made her seem hard around the edges.
“It’s him and…I suppose one of his friends when they were kids back in New Orleans.”
I stopped then, frowning when I glanced down at the picture. “My great-granddaddy was from New Orleans. They were all Creole. Or so my Dad claimed.” The two boys in the picture, a light-skinned black kid and a white boy with light hair, were smiling, laughing at something behind the camera, maybe the person who took the picture. Something felt odd, something that twisted my stomach and I caught a flash of déjà vu. It filled up my chest and made it hard to breathe.
“Who is this?” I asked Willow, turning it over to see only two things written on the back. “Summer, 1927” and “D and S”.
“My great-grandfather and his friend. He’s in this one too,” she said, digging around in the box before withdrawing another image.
The edges of the picture were frayed and the corner on the bottom left side was torn off. But they were clearly the same two boys, both standing on either side of a pretty girl. Her hair was curled, hit just below her ears and she had dark eyes with the smallest slant to them. That twist in my stomach got worse as I concentrated on the girl, trying like hell to remember why that face looked so familiar, why I knew what the sound of her voice was like or how she looked when she laughed.
“That’s… I don’t…” And then, it hit me, like a slap across the face. It hit me hard and dramatic and I stood, the photo dropping from my fingers. “That’s impossible.”
Around me the night got cold, like a twister had somehow swept through the city, not disturbing anything on the streets—no trash cans or post signs along the sidewalks, no tourists taking long shots of the Brooklyn Bridge. Everything was still and quiet, except for the ripping rhythm of my heart and the sweat that formed on my forehead.
Willow looked scared when I stepped back, her wide eyes. “What is?” Willow asked, picking up the picture from where it had fallen on her chair. “Nash?”
It occurred to me then that maybe this was all tied in to Willow after all. All this… this weird connection, the memories that rose inside me since I met her. I was a man of logic and science. I didn’t believe in things like angels or second chances or different lives. I believed in life and death and that both only came around once. But Willow didn’t. At least she swore she didn’t. That’s why she’d left me the night we slept together. That’s why she swore she couldn’t be with me. Having no faith meant I couldn’t have Willow. But this… this connection, it was too much. It was just too damn much. It literally shook the foundation of what I thought I believed.
“What is this?” I pointed at the picture, at the face I’d seen so many nights. The smile was the same, the smooth, dark skin, the flash of laughter in her eyes. It was her, I knew it. But good God, how? “What the hell is this? My God, Will, how is this even possible?”
“What—”
“Your granddaddy?”
“Great-granddaddy,” she said, moving her head into a tilt. “What about him?”
“This…” I took the picture from her, head shaking, unable to keep a tight grip on the picture. “That’s… that’s Sookie.”
Willow stared at me, mouth dropping open. “How do you know about Sookie?”
I blinked, eyes narrowing before I answered her. “I… dreamed about her, but…” I checked the picture again, the breath going out of my lungs when I recognized a younger version of the man my gramps had of in his family albums, “but she’s here and that boy… if that’s Sylv… Sylvester. My God, why didn’t I realize it before? I’m pretty damn sure Sookie was my great-grandpaw’s sister. But she died, Will. She died in—”
“A fire.”
The noise I’d heard fogging up my head, clogging sense and reason, turned into disbelief and fear, all went away with Willow’s words. Something burned me up from the inside when I looked at her. Something that made my head swim and my chest flood with dread and worry as she stepped closer. For the first time since I’d met her, I worried Willow was someone I wouldn’t be safe around. A harbinger of something unexplainable. The touchstone of something that simply could not be.
“They chased her,” she said, her voice strained, waiting for confirmation. I gave it, my head moving in the slightest nod.
“Those white men. Dempsey’s father and his friends,” I said, speaking so low that I had to strain to hear her.
I fell against the brick wall behind me, my fingers shaking, my palm sweating. She knew. She’d seen Sookie, same as me. Willow had dreamed the same dream.
“How is this possible?” I could hear the alarm in her voice, the disbelief.
“Willow…”
She shook her head, fingers trembling as she covered her mouth. “Nash… I saw it.” She watched me, pleading like she needed me to understand. The tremble in her fingers worsened and a small shudder worked over her shoulders. “I watched the whole thing happen. I… I watched Sookie die.”