Deja Who

by MaryJanice Davidson

  “She never,” Leah sobbed as he approached. “She hasn’t ever cared. At all.”

  What to say to that? There there? Don’t be silly, of course she does? Look on the bright side, maybe you’ll be murdered by the end of the week? Let’s turn that frown upside down, tiny dancer!

  “She’s awful,” was the only thing he could come up with. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine what living here was like.” Then, verrrry carefully, he reached out and gently pulled her into his arms. “Don’t cry, Leah. She’s not worth the effort to produce the tears. Plus your face will get puffy.”

  That made her cry harder. Argh! Just what I was going for, except NO. Of all the times to make a bad joke.

  “And this is ridiculous,” she said, sounding angry as well as devastated. She wriggled a little in his careful grasp, not as if she wanted to escape, but to call attention to their first . . . hug? Breakdown? “I haven’t cried in three years. I’ve only known you for three days, why am I looking to you for comfort? But here it is.” She sniffed and swallowed and said again, calmer, “Here it is.”

  It was strange. It was like Leah was almost relieved to hear someone else say it. (Not the puffy face thing. The she’s awful thing.) Archer couldn’t imagine the guilt that came with resenting—even hating—the person you were supposed to love the most, the person who was supposed to love you the most. How it felt to know that your mother saw you as a thing, a commodity to be used until you had nothing left, not for anyone else, not for you.

  “Hey, you know what?” he said into her hair, which he was trying very hard not to kiss—she fit perfectly against him, he could rest his chin on the top of her head and sort of fold her into his arms and ohhhh boy if he didn’t break this embrace soon, she was going to realize just how much he wanted her. Are you carrying around a roll of Life Savers? Okay, maybe not Life Savers. A really big carrot? But why would he carry around a big carrot? I should definitely stop thinking about the carrot I don’t have in my pants and pay attention. “Let’s go have lunch with the mayor of Boston.”

  That surprised her so much, she stopped crying. She even managed a smile. Which made the whole crazy side trip worth it—to him, at least. He wouldn’t presume to assume that Leah felt the same way.

  TWELVE

  The ex-mayor of Boston greeted her with, “You know that skinny guy who’s been following you for two weeks? He’s right behind you.”

  “Curses. You have foiled me.” Archer held out a hand. “I’m Archer Drake, Your Honor. Nice to meet you.”

  Cat cut her glance sideways. “Someone’s been sneaking you my mail.” She and Archer were roughly the same height, and she glared into his eyes as her hand swallowed his in a handshake that could decimate metacarpals. “What’s your deal?”

  “Her mom hired me to keep an eye on her to figure out the best time to approach her for her mother-daughter hooker sitcom idea.”

  “That,” Cat said, dropping Archer’s hand, “is unfortunate.”

  “Leah fired me and stabbed me, though, so I’m just here as her . . .” Friend? Former stalker? Current stalker? Hopeful would-be snuggle bunny? Hey: bunnies like carrots! WHY THE HELL CAN I NOT STOP THINKING ABOUT CARROTS? “I’m just here,” he finished. Leah caught him peeking at his white fingers. Cat had a grip like a gorilla, a statuesque showgirl-sized gorilla with keen political instincts and an instinctive distrust of Republicans. He shook his fingers and seemed relieved circulation had resumed.

  It was late afternoon, and people were streaming out of office buildings on their way home. The little park was deserted save for the three of them, giving them the illusion of peace and privacy, and Leah felt oddly tranquil.

  “I won’t deny being relieved,” she said as she watched commuters scurrying home. “I knew the permanent break was coming and . . . well. She took it all, and I wouldn’t have minded so much if she had ever admitted she had been wrong. Wrong to put me to work, wrong to keep my money, wrong to want more out of me, always moremoremore. But she won’t ever. So I can never get past it.” Ironic, given her profession. How many patients had she told forgiveness wasn’t for the person who had wronged them, it was for them? To move on. Advice she could not, would not, take.

  “Whoa.” From the mayor. “That whole thing kinda came out of nowhere. But good for you for getting it off your chest.”

  “Sorry, forgot you weren’t necessarily up on context. My mother and I are done now, and I should feel worse, right?”

  “Not our job, tellin’ you how to feel.”

  “My mom keeps slipping me law school applications because of this thing with my father I’m not going into because we’re doing your thing now,” said Archer. “Nightmare! She’s practically wallpapered my bedroom with them. So I know all about annoying parents. We’re partners in pain, Leah.”

  He winked at her and she snorted. Yes indeed, the man she couldn’t see who walked around in a cloud of fun understood exactly how she felt. She sat on one of the benches and looked at her friend and her former stalker and gave in to the rare impulse to cough up.

  I am all alone now; my mother has never looked out for me and will never look out for me and the only thing that’s changed is that I finally made it official. But closing a door doesn’t mean I can’t open a window. Or the door to the storm cellar. Or something like that. What will it hurt to open up, just once? After all the patients who found the courage to open up to someone they knew wasn’t exactly loaded with empathy?

  “I think. I want. To tell you guys something.” Hmm. Starting was difficult. “About me. About why I’m the way I am.”

  “It’s not all the drugs you did in college?” Cat asked.

  “No! Well, mostly no. When you’re an Insighter, one of the things they have you do is research your own past lives. Write up clinic notes on yourself—it’s practice for the patients you’ll hopefully be able to help one day. So. Once upon a time,” she began.

  “Excellent,” Cat said, making herself comfortable on the opposite bench. “Better with pudding, though.”

  “It would be better with pudding. Or . . . you know what, Your Honor? I wish we had marshmallows to roast. And a fire. And chocolate. Oh, well, continue.” Archer plopped on the ground at her feet, shook the hair out of his eyes, and peered up at her with those oddly lovely mismatched eyes. “It’s gonna be a good story, right?”

  “Oh, no. The heroine is either ineffectual and passive, or dies. A lot.

  “Once upon a time . . .”

  THIRTEEN

  Clinic notes: Leah Nazir, Chart #3262

  Date: 9/17/1999

  INS: Chloe Hammen, ID# 14932

  My name is Jean Rombaud.

  Jean Rombaud was the French swordsman ordered by Henry VIII to behead Anne Boleyn. Wasn’t that thoughtful of the fat tyrannical son of a bitch? He could have had his queen burned, or tortured, or both. When it came down to it, he could have not blamed her for miscarriages likely caused by his fat tyrannical sperm (he was as wide as he was tall when he died, for God’s sake).

  No and no and no. Instead he decided the woman he had pursued for a decade should be buried in pieces. But no messy crude axe for Anne Boleyn; Henry Tudor wanted only the best.

  So Jean Rombaud, expert swordsman, blitzed into town, killed the queen, and blitzed back out. And he was troubled by his duty, which was the reaction of a sane man. He had never been hired to cut off a queen’s head before. And because of the King of England’s Great Matter, he of course knew not just who she was but where she had started and how she had come to the scaffold.

  Here was a woman who literally changed the world, here was a man tripping on autocracy, and Europe could not wait to see how it played out (can you imagine the Internet uproar if it had existed back then? Henry Haterz! Anne Rulz!). But Jean, who had a front-row seat to how it would end, did not feel especially fortunate. The opposite, in fact—though not so unfortunate as
the queen.

  But he wasn’t there to debate the politics of legal murder. He wasn’t there to make friends or enemies; he was an independent contractor with a job to do. With misgivings, he did it, and he did it well—Anne Boleyn Tudor likely never felt a thing.

  And when it was done, Rombaud was, too. “Thank you for the recommendation, here is your legally murdered wife’s head, a pleasure doing business with you, I may use you as a reference, good luck with the Reformation.”

  Then he got the hell out of England, a place that always afterward gave him the creeps. He watched with the rest of Europe as the morbidly obese sociopath went through four more wives, again indulging in the legal murder of wife number five: Katherine Howard, Anne Boleyn’s cousin. Rombaud felt bad for the beheaded teenager, but was glad to be away from it all.

  The end. Except not really.

  FOURTEEN

  Clinic notes: Leah Nazir, Chart #3262

  Date: 4/1/2002

  INS: Chloe Hammen, ID# 14932

  My name is Louise Élisabeth de Croÿ.

  Louise Élisabeth de Croÿ was the governess for Marie Antoinette’s children. She saw the revolution coming from the nursery where she taught her soon-to-be-exiled-and-then-beheaded students about the divine right of kings. (And probably some math, too. She did not teach How to Survive a Revolution.) She watched it all come down, and when her charges were dead or exiled, she faded into the background to work on her memoirs. She outlived her students by decades.

  So: survivor’s guilt? Yes. She had always backed the Bourbon family; her favorite ring had Lord, save the king, the dauphin, and his sister engraved on it, which is rather awful when you consider the Lord pretty much blew that one off.

  She should never have gotten the job. The opening came about when the current governess had to flee following the fall of the Bastille; Élisabeth was delighted with her promotion to such a prestigious position, which would prove to be the ultimate mixed blessing.

  In addition to educating the royal children, the queen charged Élisabeth specifically with tackling the dauphin’s fear of loud noises. The fils de france was especially afraid of the barking from all the Versailles dogs.

  (Not what he should have been afraid of, by the way. But orders were orders. In fact, Louis XVII of France died in a dark room, “barricaded like the cage of a wild animal,” having not spoken a single word for seven months. In other words, the child died a dog’s death.)

  As Élisabeth worked to teach the three Rs (reading, wRiting, revolution) she was ringside for the destruction of the Ancient Régime, moving with the royal family from the Palace of Versailles (after a torqued-off mob of starving women stormed the place) to the Tuileries Palace. Even though society was literally disintegrating around her, Élisabeth refused to abandon her post, ask for paid sick time, or even negotiate for combat pay. She had cause to regret this after accompanying the royals on a dangerous, disastrous escape attempt to flee Paris and form a counterrevolution.

  The king of France was a noted ditherer. He was also in extreme denial, to wit: “Aw, only a few peasants are mad. Most of them love me! I’m pretty much a man of the people.” (I am paraphrasing.)

  All that to say this complicated Élisabeth’s life, which was already pretty hectic, what with not losing her mind from being afraid all the time and teaching a little boy not to fear dogs. But her loyalty never broke; it never even trembled.

  The monarchy was abolished in 1792 and everyone—including Élisabeth—was imprisoned. Louis XVI lost his head the following January; Marie Antoinette lost hers nine months later. The dauphin would be dead within two years; a dog’s death.

  Élisabeth survived it all, which was her curse. Devastated by the royal family’s executions, she would live decades longer, and would for the rest of her long life regret she had not done more when she wasn’t confronted by men trying to convince her they were the dead dauphin. Although Charles X made her a duchess after the Bourbon restoration, the dead were still dead.

  She had held the job for three years.

  FIFTEEN

  “I thought you were murdered in your other lives.”

  Leah braved a peek at Archer, who didn’t seem a) horrified, b) revolted, or c) bored. Just interested, and concerned.

  “The ones where I’m not an impotent observer, yes.”

  “What are you talking about, impotent? You—”

  “It means—”

  “Whoa, whoa.” Archer had his hands up. “I know what impotent means. From the dictionary, not from any, uh, personal issues. But how can you say you’re just a watcher—you got arrested with the entire French royal family! You tried to help them escape, it’s not your fault you all got caught. I mean it wasn’t your fault.” He squinched his eyes shut and rubbed them, hard. “Argh, hate talking about past lives, all the verb tenses get weird.”

  Leah hadn’t considered that. “Well . . . I cared about them and they all died. I couldn’t do anything.”

  “Except learn from it and bring that knowledge into your next life?”

  “Except I’m not. I just end up in the middle of some incredible terrible event in world history and can’t change anything or do anything.” Cripes, it had been so difficult to share this with them and she wasn’t sure they were getting it. Which was fair, because she wasn’t sure she was, either. But still: frustrating.

  “So, what?” the mayor asked. She and Archer were sharing Leah’s carrots. “You were always on the sidelines. Or you think you were, which can be the same thing in some cases. So?”

  Nope. They don’t get it. Should have kept my flapping mouth shut. Tight. “That isn’t—”

  “You were back then, and way back then, and way way back then, and you are now, because Insighters are always on the sidelines, it’s pretty much a job requirement, and if no one’s ever told you, you’re a bit of a chilly bitch. So?”

  “So maybe that’s the problem.” They had been in the park long enough for the sun to begin to set, and deep golden rays slanted across Cat and Archer’s faces. Leah couldn’t help but be pleased that the only two people in her life she cared about

  (you haven’t even known him a week! how is that “in your life”?)

  seemed to be getting along. Sharing carrots, even. (Ugh.)

  “What, being a chilly bitch?” At Leah’s arched eyebrows, Archer added, “I’m just using the mayor’s term! You didn’t object, so it’s agreed-upon. Unless you never want me to say it again. In which case, the term ‘chilly bitch’ is dead to me.”

  “That’s not necessary,” she said dryly, and hoped he couldn’t hear the smile lurking behind her tone.

  “Were you an Insighter in any of those lives?”

  She shook her head. “No. Or not officially.” Though around since man first clubbed his first caveman girlfriend and later felt conflicted about it, Insighters had only been officially a thing (with accepted, industry-wide salary ranges, job protection from the government, and HMO coverage) for the last few decades. “If I ever was one, I don’t remember that part. Or I’d get a flash of something from another life and put it down to nerves or superstition or being stressed out by the French Revolution.”

  “It certainly sounded stressful,” Archer agreed, and ate a carrot.

  They’d only interrupted her tales of woe twice: Archer to ask what happened to Marie Antoinette’s daughter (Madame Royale Marie-Thérèse, later dauphine of France, survived the Reign of Terror, was the queen of France for twenty minutes, and lived into her seventies), and Cat to comment that Leah’s past lives definitely proved that no matter when you lived or what you lived through, job security was paramount.

  “Really?” Archer asked, leaning back to look up at Cat, his eyebrows arching in amusement. “That’s what you’re taking away from all this? When the peasants come to cut off your head, be glad you at least kept your job?”

  “
It’s tough out there,” Cat replied, unruffled by the teasing. “Job hunting sucks. Can’t take steady work for granted in this economy. Or any other economy, come to think of it. I mean, jeez, even being a member of the ruling family isn’t a guarantee. Education is key, y’know.”

  “Anyway,” Leah continued, “I think that’s the thread. I think maybe I keep getting murdered because I can’t not be passive. Or,” she added when Archer and Cat opened their mouths, “when I try to do something, anything, and it not only fails, people die. So I’ve basically taught myself never to get involved, never to interfere.” She shook her head in frustration. “Insighting is the perfect job for me. Like Cat said: part of my nature.” Her horrible, prickly, bitchy nature, which, incredibly, neither Cat nor Archer seemed to mind. So far. She turned to Archer. “Speaking of natures, have you ever seen an Insighter? Professionally?”

  “Uh . . . no.”

  That was an odd pause. Almost like he was worried she’d be offended. But Leah, who confronted former serial killers, rapists, child killers, dictators, monarchs, and disgruntled postal workers, and had been insulted by the best (and the worst) was almost impossible to offend. When you knew you were going to be eventually murdered, it was hard to work up a state of pissed-off if someone called you a bitch.

  She frowned down at him; he was still sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of the bench. “You’ve never seen an Insighter? Not even once? Most parents bring their kids in at least once, so they can be on the lookout for . . . well . . . anything, really.” Unless, of course, they were too busy hauling their preschooler to cattle calls for juice commercials and catalog shoots for back-to-school clothes and runway tryouts for designer swimwear shows.

  The flip side of parents like Nellie, who had no use for Insight and refused to acknowledge anyone’s view but her own, were helicopter parents. Choppers were obsessed with their children’s past lives, and diagnosed same on their own. “She was born on September 11, two hours after the second tower fell, which totally explains her fear of heights! And possibly her fear of fire, planes, and OSHA regulations.”