Would you like to read the start of Chapter 1? You’re in luck! Look no further:
Chicago, 1978
The little girl with strawberry-blonde curls sits on the black office chair, her legs dangling. She is small and cherubic. She holds a stuffed giraffe in her hands, alternately hugging it and picking at its fabric eyes. She looks into the camera lens with a serious stare, and she answers the man’s question.
“Je parle le francais.” Her accent sounds perfect. Her eyes are a sandy brown color, framed with the lightest of lashes.
“How did you learn French? Were you taught by your mother?” The man’s voice is off-camera, but the girl’s eyes follow him.
She shakes her head. “Mama can’t speak French. But I know it from l’avant.”
“L’avant?” he asks. “What does that mean?”
“The before. I know French from the before.”
“What is ‘the before’ exactly? Can you explain it to me?”
“It’s when I was a different me. I lived in the place with the lavender and the parfumerie.”
Off camera, there is a low hum of voices, the sound of paper shuffling. “How did you first tell your mother about the before, Alice?”
“I don’t know. Mama?” Her brow furrows a little, and Alice looks past the camera, searching. “Mama?” The girl presses her fingers against the inside of her opposite palm, a nervous gesture, the giraffe forgotten, tumbling onto the floor.
“I’m right here, Alice,” the mother’s voice answers. “You’re doing great, honey. Do you remember the picture you drew? Can you tell Dr. Lewellyn?”
Alice’s eyes light up, but she quickly draws her brow again. “It was a scary picture. Lots of blood on the grass. I drawed a picture and Mama worried about it.”
Dr. Lewellyn asks, “Do you have a copy of this drawing?”
“Of course, at home,” the mother answers. Alice listens, biting on her bottom lip.
“Alice, can you tell me what other things you know from your time in the before?”
“Um, lots of things. They weared hats all the time.” The little girl jumps down from the chair to retrieve her giraffe. She hugs it tightly and maneuvers back into her seat. “I umm … I want to go home.” Alice looks past the camera again. “Mama?”
“Just a few more questions, honey, I promise.”
“I can play le piano!”
“The piano?” Dr. Lewellyn asks.
A woman with bright red hair enters the camera frame, and she kneels in front of Alice. She has the same upturn at the end of her nose as the girl. She holds Alice’s hands and whispers to her.
“We have the keyboard from the other studio,” Dr. Lewellyn offers, now also in the camera frame.
“She’s never had a lesson, but a few months ago, at a friend’s house, she just started playing,” the mother says. “It’s probably not that compelling to you, but I never … I … can’t explain it.”
A blonde woman moves into the frame carrying a large, freestanding keyboard. She sets it up in front of the girl, working to lower it to a child-friendly height. But Alice doesn’t wait. She jumps from her chair and begins to pluck out a melody using two fingers. After the first three or four notes, it is clear that she is playing “Frere Jacques.”
She finishes the song, while the adults clap for her. Alice joins in applauding herself, smiling.
“Ms. Grier, this is interesting.“ Dr. Lewellyn says. “Skeptics, of course, will conclude she could have picked up such a simple tune, but she—"
“It scares me,” the mother says quietly. “I don’t want—"
She is silenced as Alice begins to play another song, her hands set in perfect middle-C position, her fingering skills a wonder as she hits full chords and shows the advanced skills of a serious pianist. The mother’s hand goes to her mouth in surprise.
The room is silent for a few more bars of complicated music, until Alice hits a wrong note. This trips her up. She pauses. “Oh, the cow!”
“I think you mean, Holy Cow, Alice,” the mother whispers, clearly shaken by the piano playing. She turns to Dr. Lewellyn. “She always gets that saying wrong.”
“No, no,” a woman’s voice adds from off-camera. “It’s French. Ah, la vaca. A colloquialism. Literally, it means Oh, the cow. But it doesn’t really translate. It means something akin to, Oh my gosh!”
“Oui. Ah, la vaca,” Alice whispers, once again hugging the giraffe.
The mother shakes her head. “We need a break. Turn it off. Please,” she says, and then, the camera goes black.
Chapter 1
St. Paul, Minnesota
1998
I spread my map on the little outdoor bistro table at which Serena and I sat. We were new to St. Paul, transplanted for the summer from University of Chicago, each here for our own separate graduate research projects. I’d photocopied this map earlier at the St. Paul Historical Society, and now I tapped a finger on the handwritten cursive label of an immigrant neighborhood near the Phalen River. The neighborhood didn’t exist anymore, but back when it did, it was known as Swede Hollow or Svenska Dalen.
In real life, sometimes there were no signs. When I was younger, I was constantly looking for signs, making them up. If it’s a good song on the radio, then Mom won’t drink too much after her day at the storm-door factory. If the light stays green, then I’ll dare to ask Mom for the field trip money.
Sometimes there are signs though. A sense of deja-vu, the feeling of awareness that tickles the tiny hairs on the nape of your neck. Or is it that extra da-dum beat of your heart when you first see his face? Or even the feeling, that pull, that magnetic zing, that lures you somewhere different … but not exactly new?
The devil’s advocate in me questioned—when you’re so aware, seeking out signs, do you create them, bring them to fruition with the sheer power of your will?
I was guilty. Either way. Both ways.
My mother, Isabel Grier, had confessed, right away, once I was old enough to comprehend. Isabel told me that it was all a clever ruse, this previous-life nonsense, another of her money-grubbing schemes. And it had worked too well. “You had that birthmark,” Isabel told me, gesturing to the strawberry mark covering half my hand and fingers that crept up my forearm. “And I thought to myself, I could run with this. I could make some serious dough. I taught you a few French phrases. You were a natural on camera. It was too easy.” Mom had given me her signature wink then. She’d sucked in a drag of her cigarette, her red lipstick already staining the filter, and I believed her. Of course I believed her. She was beautiful, like the newscaster on the local Chicago station, with red hair that never frizzled. I idolized my mother. Loved every quirk of her eyebrow, every word from her mouth.
Like every kid loves her mother. I did. I hated her a little too, of course. But I mostly loved her. And believed her.
I still did, some days, even now as a twenty-five-year-old grad student, with my mother only two months in the ground.
“I’m just saying I wouldn’t mind a lumberjack,” my friend Serena said, sipping her coffee.
“We’re in Minnesota, not the Pacific Northwest, you know. There are no lumberjacks.” We sat on the main drag of downtown St. Paul, in the neighborhood of Summit Hill. We’d somehow finagled our projects to be in the same city, hers an internship in psychology, mine a research project in local history. It was convenient, and it anchored me. Serena did that for me, had been doing that for a few years. She knew Isabel well.
But she didn’t know my secret. No one did.
She continued, “Christ, Alice, let me have my fantasy. And admit it, it feels very lumberjacky here.”
“It’s all the flannel.” I dug in my backpack for my current map of St. Paul, and placed it on top of the old one. I’d annotated this one with the areas I needed to focus on: the many Hamm’s brewery buildings, the Victorian homes on Planck street, the speakeasies, the most famous of which was housed in the Wabasha Caverns.
Serena scratched her nose. “I’m probably going to get hives being so far from the El. From the lake. The bustle. It’s so quiet here.”
“It isn’t exactly the middle of nowhere, Serena. We’ll deal.”
“I haven’t been a lot of places, Alice. This whole nice Midwestern, suburban thing is throwing me for a loop. I mean, who takes on boarders in their own, actual home for God’s sake. It’s like a set-up in a small-town horror flick.”
I laughed and gave Serena a look, shaking my head. We were both staying at a quirky Victorian boarding house up the road that sat atop the sandstone bluffs above a picturesque green-space community park.
I compared my current map of St. Paul with the photocopy of the older turn-of-the-century map. Swede Hollow. I had learned about it in my earlier research, even before I came here, and I could’ve seen it as a sign. Sure.
The whole Swede thing.
It could’ve factored into my decision to come here to do my research, to write my thesis, rather than to go somewhere else—anywhere else, really.
He was a Swede.
I remembered the stiff click of his consonants, the reluctance to form the English “j” sound. I remembered everything about him.
Whether it was real or not.