The Pace (27 page)

“Do you see that, Amelia?”

I nodded.

He was bewildered. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

It was amazing to watch the bruises begin to get smaller and smaller, but the shouting was ear-piercing. It wasn’t worth the pain. “Dr. Thomas, he’s in pain, make it stop,” I said.

“I can’t.”

“I can’t watch it. I won’t stand here and wait for it to reach the heart.”

“Amelia,
please
. I don’t want this any more than you do, but his mother insisted. Now, stay. You can’t leave a patient.”

He was right. As much internal sadness as I was feeling, I couldn’t leave him. He hadn’t asked for this. I took a deep breath and refocused. He was still convulsing, and the only thing I could do was talk to him. “Weston,” I said in his ear. He stopped hollering and clenched his jaw in response to my voice. “Dr. Thomas has given you special blood to make you better. It’s the only way to save you. I know it hurts, but it’s the only way.” He started breathing heavily to hold back more screams. I stroked his forehead with my hand and kept talking to him. “Your mother is downstairs. She begged Dr. Thomas to save you, and this is the only way he can. You have to hang on. The new blood is working its way through your body.”

He started shaking his head. “Make it stop, make it stop.”

I rested my cheek beside his. “I can’t make it stop, but I promise you, it will be over soon. Your bruises are already fading. It’s fixing you. You’ll be better soon.”

He was still shaking, and our heads started to rock slowly in unison. I didn’t leave him. I wanted him to know that someone was there with him. After a while, I tried to stand to go get his mother and he grunted a clear, “No! Don’t…leave…me.”

“I want to get your mother for you,” I murmured.

He was panting. “No, please…don’t let….her see…me like…this.”

“All right, all right,” I said.

Dr. Thomas was assessing Weston like a mad scientist. He was checking his fingers, his toes, every inch of him, and taking notes.

“Incredible,” he observed. I didn’t see anything incredible with the torture Wes was enduring. “I can see the blood traveling through the veins. It’s amazing,” he said.

I closed my eyes to ignore the momentary optimism and focused on keeping close to Wes’ face so he could feel my presence. Wes’ transfusion was worse than the other patients’ had been. With them, I remembered the pain only lasting about ten minutes, and then there were a few hours of silence before the screaming picked up again. With Wes, it was a constant pain and fighting the restraints for three whole hours. Even when that stopped, he started shivering uncontrollably.

“What’s happening, doctor?” I asked.

He looked just as perplexed as I did. “I don’t know,” he reported. “This is odd.” He was feeling his pulse. “His pulse is slowing down, but this is remarkable. The bruises are gone.” He looked around, assessing Wes’ needs. “Get him some more blankets.”

I hurried out and came back with several blankets. Wes was cold and needed several layers just to manage the chills.

Wes abruptly interrupted my trance with a light nudge. “Sophie, I think we should pick this up later.”

“What? Why?” I asked, realizing I was breathing hard.

“You’re getting all worked up, and you seem distant. I don’t want to frighten you.”

I turned toward him and nestled closer. “No, I’m okay. I think I was just remembering. Please. Tell me more.” He remained quiet for a few moments and during that time, my mind was blank. I couldn’t picture anything. I was eager for him to start talking again. “Tell me what happened after I brought you the blankets.”

He pulled his head back. “I didn’t say you brought me blankets. I’m not there yet. How did you know that?” His eyes were fixed on me in the darkness.

“I told you. I think I’m remembering some things. Now, please keep talking.”

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. Now tell me what happened next.”

“Sophie, this is a really big deal, if you’re remembering this.”

“I know, but I can’t see anything else. It’s all gone. I need you to keep going.”

He studied me for a few more minutes and then started reciting his memory, but I could tell he was assessing my every expression.

“By the second day, I was kept warm with the help of the blankets. Dr. Thomas had also moved me into his study because there was a large fireplace in there. I was made comfortable enough for my mother to visit.” He paused to check for my reaction. I gave him nothing other than an indication that I was listening attentively, so he continued.

“Dr. Thomas was ecstatic that I had made it past the first twenty-four hours, and so was my mother.” He started to taper off in deep thought.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

He gave me a gentle squeeze. “Nothing. That’s the story. That’s how I was made into what I am.”

“That’s it?” I asked, knowing there was more.

“That’s all they told me.”

He was avoiding something, and I wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily.

“Wes, you have to tell me everything. We can’t have any more secrets.”

“What else do you want to know?”

“I want to know it all. What happened to you after that? What happened to Amelia? How did we fall in love?”

He laughed gently. “In case you hadn’t noticed, I loved you the very first time I saw you.”

“Well, I want to know everything. You have to tell me the rest. All of it,” I urged.

He took another deep breath and began again. “Well, when I woke up, the room was spinning, and it got worse with every day that passed. The only way I could function was to keep my eyes closed. You ended up tying a blindfold around my eyes to make it easier for me. Dr. Thomas was convinced that it would pass as I recovered. Neither he nor my mother noticed my true transformation at first, but you did.

“You were actually the one to figure out that my temperature was off. Dr. Thomas would put me in front of the fire and within minutes, you could tell I was getting too hot. Dr. Thomas first attributed it to a fever caused by something internal, and you brought it to his attention that it was my surroundings that were making me hot or cold. That’s when he started suspecting the cold-blood was changing me.

“You also recognized that my time perception was off. I couldn’t see you, but I could feel you with me all the time. One day, I apparently kept thanking you because it seemed like you were constantly giving me things. You would try to give me food or drink, and I insisted that you’d already given it to me. That’s when you knew something wasn’t right.

“You had Dr. Thomas look into my sanity. It was then that we realized I was seeing days go by in minutes. He immediately stopped his research on the cold-blood and filled my mother in on what was happening to me. Neither of them knew what was going on, and she agreed to let him keep me in his care to monitor me.”

He began to taper off again, and I could tell he was growing hesitant to continue. I started rubbing his arm in hopes of encouraging him. “What happened next?” I asked.

“Next, is when my mother caught the Spanish Influenza. I wasn’t even able to say goodbye to her. All I remember is that you brought in a letter from her that told me how much she loved me, and that was it. She wouldn’t even come near me, because she was afraid I would catch it from her. The worst part was that it happened so fast. I couldn’t even tell her I loved her because the whole sickness was a blur to me. It was over before I knew it began. I was going to lose my sanity altogether, but…”

“But what?” I asked.

“You saved me again. After that, I wouldn’t eat or drink. I just kept my eyes closed and blocked everything out. After awhile, you started reading Whitman poetry to me. Your voice was like a song in my ear. I focused on nothing else, and eventually I was able to slow down your voice. That’s the first time I realized I could stop the blur if I concentrated hard enough. The sound of your voice became the only thing I looked forward to. It kept me sane for a while.”

“What do you mean ‘for a while’?”

He started to get tense. “I went insane anyway. Dr. Thomas brought me a letter from you, in what felt like minutes after you had been reading to me one day. You wrote that you were happy that I was saved and that it was the greatest accomplishment you’d ever had. You thanked me for my graciousness, and you asked me to always remember to do what is right, because the transformation worked on me for a reason. And you signed it, ‘Love, Amelia.’”

“Why did that make you crazy?”

“Because I knew it meant you were sick, too. You had caught what my mother had and you, also, stayed away so I wouldn’t get sick. I called for you and tried my best to focus, but the next thing I knew, Dr. Thomas told me you had died. The news sent me into a delirium. Sophie, you spent a year and a half taking care of me, and I wasn’t coherent enough to reciprocate the least bit of courtesy to you when you were sick.”

“Wes, do you know how many people died from that epidemic? It was bound to happen, and it would’ve happened to you, too, if you hadn’t been kept away. Then where would we be now?”

“Sophie, I don’t get sick. I’m immune to everything that I know of.”

I started to feel a sense of his withdrawing from me, and I wanted it to stop. I wanted to change the subject.

“Well, the point is that I’m here now, right?”

He pulled me up against his chest and kissed my head tenderly. We lay there in the darkness for a while, and then I became curious.

“What am I, some sort of reincarnation?”

“I’ve asked myself that many times. But I don’t know. I haven’t encountered anyone else from the past. I don’t understand it.”

“Then how did you know for sure that I was Amelia?”

He answered with ease. “Sophie, let’s just say I went away and you stayed the same age for thirty years. Then let’s say you saw me again, and I was roughly the same age as I am now. Wouldn’t you know for sure if it was me?”

I thought about it for a second. “I would never forget you.”

“Exactly. I would know you anywhere.”

“So then, I must be reincarnated. Why do you think I keep coming back and not remembering?”

He started rubbing my hair again, and I was glad to feel him relax a little. “Well, you seem to be remembering some things.”

“Yes, but only when you give me something to picture.”

“Well, I’ve read a lot of books on people who think they’ve lived before, and the only thing I gather is those people believe their life’s purpose was not completed. They believe they’ve returned to finish something they were meant to do, and the actual memories are not what’s important—it’s their purpose that is.”

I pondered that idea.
What could I have been meant to do?
How could I even know that if I couldn’t even remember what I was doing in the first place?
I tried to think really hard about what my purpose could be. I was never good at figuring it out in my current life, never mind one I didn’t remember. I lay there thinking about everything I did that made me feel as if I’d accomplished something.

I had won a spelling bee in the third grade. I’d won an art show in the ninth grade. I passed my driver’s test on the first try. I had been on the honor roll for the last two years. Those were trivial things. I had to think deeper.
What had I done that made me feel like I made a difference?

Every answer I came up with led back to Wes. The pier, trusting him, and just being with him. It all led back to him, and when I compared it to Amelia, it also led back to him. She was the only one who had helped him when he needed it. If it hadn’t been for her taking him to Dr. Thomas, he would’ve died.

The only significant common denominator between my accomplishments and hers was Wes. I sat up in complete understanding.

“You,” I whispered.

“What about me?” he said, sitting up as well.

“It’s you. I’m here for you. Think about it. You, technically, aren’t supposed to be here, but you are. And maybe you need me to come back for you.”

“What are you saying, Sophie?”

I shifted closer to him. “You said you loved me two times prior. The first time, you said I saved your life. When was the second time?”

He thought about it for a moment. “It was a few years after Dr. Thomas died.”

“What were you doing? Were you hurt?”

“Not yet, but I was going to be soon, had you not returned.”

“Don’t you see it, Wes?”

His eyes narrowed in thought. I touched his shoulder. “Why would I come back and just happen to run into you? You said it yourself. You believe in fate.”

He looked at me, considering the idea. “So what does that mean exactly?” he asked.

I turned so I was completely square to him. “It means I’m here for you.”

I meant what I said. I felt it in every bone of my body. Weston was mine, and I was his. We were meant to be together in this world, so much that not even death could keep us apart. I knew it, and if I knew that, then I must also know there is a greater power that controls my destiny. In order for my soul to leave this place and come back to Wes, I had to believe there was an even greater purpose. We just needed to wait for it to be revealed.

No matter how much Wes feared the future, I couldn’t deny the gifts of the past. It gave true meaning to the term soul mate. I went to sleep in Wes’ arms that night, and despite the fact that he still believed my death was approaching, I slept in perfect peace. I knew I had existed before. Our love was timeless, and it couldn’t be replicated.

When I woke up the next morning, Wes was already gone, which wasn’t unusual. What was unusual was the small box sitting on my nightstand with a note attached. It read:

Sophie,

You are as beautiful now as you were the day I met you.

Love,

Wes

I smiled as I read the words. I slowly opened the box, wondering what timeless gift he had in store for me. Resting in the bottom of the box was a faded picture of Wes sitting between a young Dr. Thomas and a nurse who was the mirror image of me.