CHAPTER FOUR

Déjà vu

The dream came to Nate when he was still in his mother’s womb. Try as he might through years of random reflection, he had no other explanation. It had always been with him. Even at fifty-five, it was the most vivid of any memory in the bank of his brain.

The Girl stood three steps above him framed by the large oak door at the entrance to their elementary school. She wore a plaid jumper of navy and gold over a white blouse with a broad collar. And on the short white socks at her ankles? A tiny blue ribbon bow dressed the fold at the top above shiny black shoes. As The Girl smiled down at him from her concrete pedestal, she fingered the stem of a single white carnation in one hand. Her other hand rested gently, for balance, on the black metal railing that drew a line leading up to the door and served as a minor, but not insurmountable, divide between them. And it was there that Nate professed his undying love for The Girl. She owned his heart. She would always have his heart. He told her so.

“You’re the one I love, not anyone else.”

What did that mean? Whenever the dream escaped into Nate’s consciousness, the words were the same. He was too young to understand them, but those were the words he used. He knew that much and he knew how it made him feel.

Squooshy.

And warm.

Like a handful of macaroni and cheese.

The dream was so natural he simply took for granted it was part of who he was, like the tiny birthmark behind his right ear or having large feet that he’d never quite grow into. For the first six years of his life, he gave the dream no more thought than to accept its existence. The dream hid in some recess of his soul as he grew from a chubby rug rat into a precocious little human. He didn’t notice it through his formative years as he learned to talk and connect dots of comprehension, to make sentences and express feelings. It surely was there in the background as his emotional neurons clashed and sparked, clinging to one another for survival, shaping into a personality. Nate never fully understood its significance until he was much older and much wiser.

At age six.

Nate recognized The Girl the moment he saw her in the flesh for the first time. Déjà vu didn’t come calling with a simple tap on the shoulder. No. Déjà vu lifted Nate by his scrawny shoulders and tossed him with all its might into that familiar dream onto the sidewalk at the bottom of those steps in front of the school on the day he started first grade. He didn’t know déjà vu from Scooby-Doo, but he knew for certain he had been there before. He had lived that exact moment. There he was again with those words on his tongue.

Déjà vu. Nate wouldn’t learn it had a name for years, but no matter. On that day, he only knew it wasn’t a dream after all. He felt it. He breathed it and it smelled like, well, it smelled like Girl. It was all there.

Trouble breathing? Check.

Sweaty palms? Check.

Heart pounding in his throat? Check and double check.

And those words “You’re the one I love,” they danced on the tip of his tongue sweet as the first lick of ice cream. Nate knew he would say those words to her.

Déjà vu. The sensation was a fact even if its cause, its very essence, was a mystery that scoffed at every psychologist, philosopher, paranormal expert, MRI-toting brain scientist, reincarnation disciple, wino and wacko with a theory about it. You couldn’t get déjà vu; it got you. Some believed it was nothing more than wishful thinking of an overactive imagination. Buddha might suggest it was one of our past lives nudging the present. Regardless of whether the sensation was a random clash of memories and desires, a spark of loose wires in the brain or past lives visiting the present, if déjà vu ever needed a poster boy, Nate came to believe it picked him, and it picked him that moment in time when he was six.

He had dawdled the morning away on the first day of first grade. His mother rushed as she dropped him at the curb and pushed him toward the front door. She had given him a single white carnation, a gift for the new teacher. He paused at the bottom of the steps, turned and waved to his mother as she climbed into the car and drove away. Nate sucked a bit of the cool September air and studied the tips of his black dress shoes, below the cuffs of his new brown corduroy pants. That was part of the school uniform at Saint Christopher of the Cross Catholic School. Chriscross Elementary to those who hadn’t confessed the sin of irreverence to Father Dean and done penance for excessive whimsy.

Nate was scared and excited, nervous and filled with the wonderment that only the promise of adventure could offer. A ten-foot-tall nun in her black habit, gathered at the waist by a belt of rosary beads, held open the front door and clanged a hand bell. She called to the stragglers. Stop loitering. Come inside. Grow up and get educated. It’s time.

Nate was lost in absorbing the moment and scarcely felt the awkward bump that caused his world to stop.

The Girl had raven, wavy hair to her shoulders and dark brown eyes that twinkled like Fourth of July sparklers whenever she laughed. Through the years, she would laugh easily and often when Nate was around. That day, in first grade, The Girl was just as he had dreamed, right down to her smile. It was a toothy smile with a shadow of a gap between the front two and a mouth that was thin on the corners with full, round lips dead center.

The Girl knelt down and picked up Nate’s white carnation that had fallen to the sidewalk. When she stood, he was certain she had recognized him, too. Her eyes were wide until shyness forced her to look away. The nun clanged her bell. The Girl skipped up the stairs. At the top, she paused with one hand on the railing. Nate waited until she turned so he could say the words that had been with him since birth. But The Girl did not turn and smile down upon him as he expected. She passed by Sister and disappeared into the building still clutching his carnation. That wasn’t the way things ended the first time this had happened, though he couldn’t recall a definitive end to his first encounter with The Girl.

The difference confused him only enough to pause before he bounded up the stairs and down the hall after her with the aid of a stern but kindly cuff on the back of the head from Sister. A few minutes later, after being led to their desks in the classroom, each one tagged with their first names printed in big block letters on a strip of paper taped to the top, the students took turns standing and introducing themselves to the teacher and to the class. The Girl sat at the head of the second row, and Nate sat two students behind her in the last desk. When it was her turn, The Girl stood, tugged at the sides of her skirt and toed the floor. Her voice was soft but determined, and from three desks away, Nate heard her tell all the world that she loved him, too. Her exact words?

“My name is Julie Cooper.”