urge to ask how she could know anything of his life. Instead he shrugged and replied, “That happened a long time ago.”
“Nooooo, it didn’t,” she said, her voice rising in a singsong. “Not really. Eight years ago, August twenty-fifth, you formally requested a transfer to Asia. It was after you knew you couldn’t help her. You blamed yourself for the breakup, and maybe if it hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t have gone out with the man who worked at the consulate in Lyon. He raped her after he lured her up to the embassy’s corporate hotel room off Rivoli, and he beat her, detaching her retina. She tested positive for HIV. It’s why you delayed visiting me. It’s why you feel conflicted about the Booth. You want punishment, but you also know terrible things change people forever. And you felt there was no pattern to life after Thérèse died in a car accident in Hamburg—”
“I think you’ve made your point,” he whispered.
Don’t ask how, he ordered himself, his mind racing. The how doesn’t matter right now because she obviously picked up this trick from wherever she went.
He forced himself to consider the why of her spouting the details of his life. She hadn’t done it with the others who’d come with their clipboards full of questions.
That meant she had singled him out for this mind game. It also meant he had an advantage, leverage. If only he could figure out what it was and how to use it.
He sat very still, hoping his breathing wasn’t fast. He couldn’t hear it. He was only conscious of Mary Ash, still drawing but not looking at the paper.
“I suppose you can tell me where I was August twenty-fifth last year,” he suggested, playing for time.
“Not an interesting day. You got your teeth cleaned at the dentist’s in the morning. You were upset with a foreign exchange student in the afternoon lecture, a Chilean who thought the CIA was right to topple Allende.”
“February sixteenth, 1985.”
The pale green eyes blinked then held him steady as she recited, “You were twelve and still living in Chicago. It was cold. There was snow on the ground, and you kissed Heather Dershowitz in your family’s basement rec-room while working on a history project together about World War One. You were embarrassed because your erection pushed out your jeans. She was eleven and scared she might get pregnant, and you had to show her books that proved it was impossible.”
She turned to look out her window briefly and added, “They call it hyperthymesia: the ability to recall vivid autobiographical detail according to dates. I don’t think it’s very impressive to remember stuff about yourself.”
“So you remember it about others.”
Her eyes fell gently on him again as she offered another fleeting smile. “Yes. You don’t have to worry, Mr. Cale. I’m not reading your mind, and the effect doesn’t last. And no, it has nothing to do with the physical contact when we shook hands either.”
“You just meet a person and…?”
“You know that quantum physics is responsible for how a television works, but you don’t know how. You still go on watching television, don’t you? Because you can.”
“Do you know about quantum physics?”
“Of course not!” she laughed.
With a flash of insight, he leaned in as he asked in a murmur, “You grew your fingers back, didn’t you?”
She lifted the charcoal pencil as she answered pleasantly, “Well, I do need my fingers, Mr. Cale.”
He nodded without saying a word, taking it in.
“I need to take a nap now, if you don’t mind,” she said.
“All right. Thank you for talking to me, Mary.”
“Not at all, you’re a very intelligent and interesting man,” she said as he rose to go. “You’ve been fortunate to see special things. You’ll get to see others.”
“What other things?”
She shrugged, just like a young woman trading casual gossip in the street, having run into an acquaintance. “I don’t know. I just know you’ll be near the center of it. You’ll feel better when you remember something.”
“What’s that?”
“That when you’re here, you must be here, Mr. Cale.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t know how to explain it better. I volunteered at this daycare once. I went to help blind kids with a sculpture class, and I realized they’ve never seen red. So how do you explain what red is to them?”
“Have you seen these things you’re talking about?”
“No. Sorry. They’re for you. You’re still untainted.”
He stared at her.
Then she broke into a mischievous giggle. “I’m just messing with you, Mr. Cale. They didn’t send me back. But if I could know about your girlfriend in Paris, I could know about them, couldn’t I?”
He was still staring at her.
“You should be happy, Mr. Cale. You learned what you wanted. I had terrible things happen to me, and I’m not changed.”
He stood in the doorway and saw the mother hovering at the top of the stairs, wearing the same anxious expression as she had in the living room. He had one more question for the girl, but he couldn’t bring himself to ask. It was too terrible.
Mary Ash fixed him rigid in her stare, saying, “It’s all right, Mr. Cale. I told you I can’t read your mind, but you’re giving your question away on your face. It’s okay. No one else would bother to think of it, not because it’s wrong, but because they don’t have your way of seeing. And the answer’s no.”
As he nodded his goodbye, he caught a quick glimpse of Mary Ash lowering the pad of paper.
There was nothing on it. Blank.
But he had heard the scratching of the charcoal. She had drawn, erased, sketched again and shaded with strokes.
There was nothing on the paper.
The mother waited until he was at the door before she asked what Mary meant. “She said ‘no’ to your last question, but you didn’t ask it. What did you want to ask her?”
“It’s okay, Mrs. Ash,” he said. “I’m sorry I imposed on you.” He walked back to his car, wanting to get away from the house as quickly as possible.
No, he wouldn’t burden the mother with the question that had been on his lips. The poor haunted woman didn’t deserve to agonize over that idea, and he barely wanted to consider it himself: whether Mary Ash had somehow actually chosen—from whatever mysterious place she inhabited—to “kill Emmett Nickelbaum back.” And if this was what had allowed her to return into their world.
The start of the Bolshevik Revolution.
The ends of the First and Second World Wars.
The polio vaccine.
The John F. Kennedy assassination.
The announcement of Mary Ash’s return was added to a unique and truly exclusive catalogue, each entry a marker of when people around the world took stock of their era and their place in it. The Apollo Moon landing. The horror of 9/11. Where were you when you heard? What were you doing when this happened? A murderer had been executed, which was nothing new, but for the first time in history, his victim had come back after this was done.
The media dubbed