Dreams Underfoot

Paperjack

Churches aren’t havens of spiritual enlightenment; they enclose the spirit. The way Jilly explains it, organizing Mystery tends to undermine its essence. I’m not so sure I agree, but then I don’t really know enough about it. When it comes to things that can’t be logically explained, I take a step back and leave them to Jilly or my brother Christy—they thrive on that kind of thing. If I had to describe myself as belonging to any church or mystical order, it’d be one devoted to secular humanism. My concerns are for real people and the here and now; the possible existence of God, faeries, or some metaphysical Otherworld just doesn’t fit into my worldview.

Except ...

You knew there’d be an “except,” didn’t you, or else why would I be writing this down?

It’s not like I don’t have anything to say. I’m all for creative expression, but my medium’s music. I’m not an artist like Jilly, or a writer like Christy. But the kinds of things that have been happening to me can’t really be expressed in a fiddle tune—no, that’s not entirely true. I can express them, but the medium is such I can’t be assured that, when I’m playing, listeners hear what I mean them to hear.

That’s how it works with instrumental music, and it’s probably why the best of it is so enduring: the listener takes away whatever he or she wants from it. Say the composer was trying to tell us about the aftermath of some great battle. When we hear it, the music might speak to us of a parent we’ve lost, a friend’s struggle with some debilitating disease, a doe standing at the edge of a forest at twilight, or any of a thousand other unrelated things.

Realistic art like Jilly does—or at least it’s realistically rendered; her subject matter’s right out of some urban update of those Andrew Lang colorcoded fairy tale books that most of us read when we were kids—and the collections of urban legends and stories that my brother writes don’t have that same leeway. What goes down on the canvas or on paper, no matter how skillfully drawn or written, doesn’t allow for much in the way of an alternate interpretation.

So that’s why I’m writing this down: to lay it all out in black and white where maybe I can understand it myself.

For the past week, every afternoon after busking up by the Williamson Street Mall for the lunchtime crowds, I’ve packed up my fiddle case and headed across town to come here to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Once I get here, I sit on the steps about halfway up, take out this notebook, and try to write. The trouble is, I haven’t been able to figure out where to start.

I like it out here on the steps. I’ve played inside the cathedral—just once, for a friend’s wedding. The wedding was okay, but I remember coming in on my own to test the acoustics an hour or so before the rehearsal; ever since then I’ve been a little unsure about how Jilly views this kind of place. My fiddling didn’t feel enclosed. Instead the walls seemed to open the music right up; the cathedral gave the reel I was playing a stately grace—a spiritual grace—that it had never held for me before. I suppose it had more to do with the architect’s design than the presence of God, still I could’ve played there all night only But I’m rambling again. I’ve filled a couple of pages now, which is more than I’ve done all week, except after just rereading what I’ve written so far, I don’t know if any of it’s relevant.

Maybe I should just tell you about Paperjack. I don’t know that it starts with him exactly, but it’s probably as good a place as any to begin.

It was a glorious day, made all the more precious because the weather had been so weird that spring.

One day I’d be bundled up in a jacket and scarf, cloth cap on my head, with fingerless gloves to keep the cold from my finger joints while I was out busking, the next I’d be in a Tshirt, breaking into a sweat just thinking about standing out on some street corner to play tunes.

There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, the sun was halfway home from noon to the western horizon, and Jilly and I were just soaking up the rays on the steps of St. Paul’s. I was slouched on the steps, leaning on one elbow, my fiddlecase propped up beside me, wishing I had worn shorts because my jeans felt like leaden weights on my legs. Sitting beside me, perched like a cat about to pounce on something terribly interesting that only it could see, Jilly was her usual scruffy self. There were flecks of paint on her loose cotton pants and her shortsleeved blouse, more under her fingernails, and still more halflost in the tangles of her hair. She turned to look at me, her face miraculously untouched by her morning’s work, and gave me one of her patented smiles.

“Did you ever wonder where he’s from?” Jilly asked.

That was one of her favorite phrases: “Did you ever wonder ... ?” It could take you from considering if and when fish slept, or why people look up when they’re thinking, to more arcane questions about ghosts, little people living behind wallboards, and the like. And she loved guessing about people’s origins. Sometimes when I was busking she’d tag along and sit by the wall at my back, sketching the people who were listening to me play. Invariably, she’d come up behind me and whisper in my ear—usually when I was in the middle of a complicated tune that needed all my attention—something along the lines of, “The guy in the polyester suit? Ten to one he rides a big chopper on the weekends, complete with a jean vest.”

So I was used to it.

Today she wasn’t picking out some nameless stranger from a crowd. Instead her attention was on Paperjack, sitting on the steps far enough below us that he couldn’t hear what we were saying.

Paperjack had the darkest skin I’d ever seen on a man—an amazing ebony that seemed to swallow light. He was in his midsixties, I’d guess, short corkscrew hair all gone grey. The dark suits he wore were threadbare and out of fashion, but always clean. Under his suit jacket he usually wore a white Tshirt that flashed so brightly in the sun it almost hurt your eyes—just like his teeth did when he gave you that lopsided grin of his.

Nobody knew his real name and he never talked. I don’t know if he was mute, or if he just didn’t have anything to say, but the only sounds I ever heard him make were a chuckle or a laugh. People started calling him Paperjack because he worked an origami gig on the streets.

He was a master at folding paper into shapes. He kept a bag of different colored paper by his knee; people would pick their color and then tell him what they wanted, and he’d make it—no cuts, just folding. And he could make anything. From simple flower and animal shapes to things so complex it didn’t seem possible for him to capture their essence in a piece of folded paper. So far as I know, he’d never disappointed a single customer.

I’d seen some of the old men come down from Little Japan to sit and watch him work. They called him sensei, a term of respect that they didn’t exactly bandy around.

But origami was only the most visible side of his gig. He also told fortunes. He had one of those little folded paper Chinese fortunetelling devices that we all played around with when we were kids. You know the kind: you fold the corners in to the center, turn it over, then fold them in again. When you’re done you can stick your index fingers and thumbs inside the little flaps of the folds and open it up so that it looks like a flower. You move your fingers back and forth, and it looks like the flower’s talking to you.

Paperjack’s fortuneteller was just like that. It had the names of four colors on the outside and eight different numbers inside. First you picked a color—say, red. The fortuneteller would seem to talk soundlessly as his fingers moved back and forth to spell the word, RE-D, opening and closing until there’d be a choice from four of the numbers. Then you picked a number, and he counted it out until the fortuneteller was open with another or the same set of numbers revealed. Under the number you choose at that point was your fortune.

Paperjack didn’t read it out—he just showed it to the person, then stowed the fortuneteller back into the inside pocket of his jacket from which he’d taken it earlier. I’d never had my fortune read by him, but Jilly’d had it done for her a whole bunch of times.

“The fortunes are always different,” she told me once. “I sat behind him while he was doing one for a customer, and I read the fortune over her shoulder. When she’d paid him, I got mine done. I picked the same number she did, but when he opened it, there was a different fortune there.”

“He’s just got more than one of those paper fortunetellers in his pocket,” I said, but she shook her head.

“He never put it away,” she said. “It was the same fortuneteller, the same number, but some time between the woman’s reading and mine, it changed.”

I knew there could be any number of logical explanations for how that could have happened, starting with plain sleight of hand, but I’d long ago given up continuing arguments with ply when it comes to that kind of thing.

Was Paperjack magic? Not in my book, at least not the way Jilly thought he was. But there was a magic about him, the magic that always hangs like an aura about someone who’s as good an artist as Paperjack was. He also made me feel good. Around him, an overcast day didn’t seem half so gloomy, and when the sun shone, it always seemed brighter. He just exuded a glad feeling that you couldn’t help but pick up on. So in that sense, he was magic.

I’d also wondered where he’d come from, how he’d ended up on the street. Street people seemed pretty well evenly divided between those who had no choice but to be there, and those who chose to live there like I do. But even then there’s a difference. I had a little apartment not far from filly’s. I could get a job when I wanted one, usually in the winter when the busking was bad and club gigs were slow.

Not many street people have that choice, but I thought that Paperjack might be one of them.

“He’s such an interesting guy,” filly was saying.

I nodded.

“But I’m worried about him,” she went on.

“How so?”

Jilly’s brow wrinkled with a frown. “He seems to be getting thinner, and he doesn’t get around as easily as he once did. You weren’t here when he showed up today—he walked as though gravity had suddenly doubled its pull on him.”

“Well, he’s an old guy, filly.”

“That’s exactly it. Where does he live? Does he have someone to look out for him?”

That was Jilly for you. She had a heart as big as the city, with room in it for everyone and everything.

She was forever taking in strays, be they dogs, cats, or people.

I’d been one of her strays once, but that was a long time ago.

“Maybe we should ask him,” I said.

“He can’t talk,” she reminded me.

“Maybe he just doesn’t want to talk.”

Jilly shook her head. “I’ve tried a zillion times. He hears what I’m saying, and somehow he manages to answer with a smile or a raised eyebrow or whatever, but he doesn’t talk.” The wrinkles in her brow deepened until I wanted to reach over and smooth them out. “These days,” she added, “he seems haunted to me.”

If someone else had said that, I’d know that they meant Paperjack had something troubling him. With Jilly though, you often had to take that kind of a statement literally.

“Are we talking ghosts now?” I asked.

I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice, but from the flash of disappointment that touched Jilly’s eyes, I knew I hadn’t done a very good job.

“Oh, Geordie,” she said. “Why can’t you just believe what happened to us?”

Here’s one version of what happened that night, some three years ago now, to which Jilly was referring:

We saw a ghost. He stepped out of the past on a rainy night and stole away the woman I loved. At least that’s the way I remember it. Except for Jilly, no one else does.

Her name was Samantha Rey. She worked at Gypsy Records and had an apartment on Stanton Street, except after that night, when the past came up to steal her away, no one at Gypsy Records remembered her anymore, and the landlady of her Stanton Street apartment had never heard of her. The ghost hadn’t just stolen her, he’d stolen all memory of her existence.

All I had left of her was an old photograph that Jilly and I found in Moore’s Antiques a little while later. It had a photographer’s date on the back: 1912. It was Sam in the picture, Sam with a group of strangers standing on the front porch of some old house.

I remembered her, but she’d never existed. That’s what I had to believe. Because nothing else made sense. I had all these feelings and memories of her, but they had to be what my brother called jamais vu.

That’s like deja vu, except instead of having felt you’d been somewhere before, you remembered something that had never happened. I’d never heard the expression before—he got it from a David Morrell thriller that he’d been reading—but it had an authentic ring about it.

Jamais vu.

But Jilly remembered Sam, too.

Thinking about Sam always brought a tightness to my chest; it made my head hurt trying to figure it out. I felt as if I were betraying Sam by trying to convince myself she’d never existed, but I had to convince myself of that, because believing that it really had happened was even scarier. How do you live in a world where anything can happen?

“You’ll get used to it,” Jilly told me. “There’s a whole invisible world out there, lying side by side with our own. Once you get a peek into it, the window doesn’t close. You’re always going to be aware of it.”

“I don’t want to be,” I said.

She just shook her head. “You don’t really get a lot of choice in this kind of thing,” she said.

You always have a choice—that’s what I believe. And I chose to not get caught up in some invisible world of ghosts and spirits and who knew what. But I still dreamed of Sam, as if she’d been real. I still kept her photo in my fiddlecase.

I could feel its presence right now, glimmering through the leather, whispering to me.

Remember me ...

I couldn’t forget. Jamais vu. But I wanted to.

Jilly scooted a little closer to me on the step and laid a hand on my knee.

“Denying it just makes things worse,” she said, continuing an old ongoing argument that I don’t think we’ll ever resolve. “Until you accept that it really happened, the memory’s always going to haunt you, undermining everything that makes you who you are.”

“Haunted like Paperjack?” I asked, trying to turn the subject back onto more comfortable ground, or at least focus the attention onto someone other than myself. “Is that what you think’s happened to him?”

Jilly sighed. “Memories can be just like ghosts,” she said. Didn’t I know it.

I looked down the steps to where Paperjack had been sitting, but he was gone, and now a couple of pigeons were waddling across the steps. The wind blew a candy bar wrapper up against a riser. I laid my hand on Dilly’s and gave it a squeeze, then picked up my fiddlecase and stood up.

“I’ve got to go,” I told her.

“I didn’t mean to upset you ...”

“I know. I’ve just got to walk for a bit and think.”

She didn’t offer to accompany me and for that I was glad. Jilly was my best friend, but right then I had to be alone.

I went rambling; just let my feet just take me wherever they felt like going, south from St. Paul’s and down Battersfield Road, all the way to the Pier, my fiddlecase banging against my thigh as I walked.

When I got to the waterfront, I leaned up against the fieldstone wall where the Pier met the beach. I stood and watched the fishermen work their lines farther out over the lake. Fat gulls wheeled above, crying like they hadn’t been fed in months. Down on the sand, a couple was having an animated discussion, but they were too far away for me to make out what they were arguing about. They looked like figures in some old silent movie; caricatures, their movements larger than life, rather than real people.

I don’t know what I was thinking about; I was trying not to think, I suppose, but I wasn’t having much luck. The arguing couple depressed me.

Hang on to what you’ve got, I wanted to tell them, but it wasn’t any of my business. I thought about heading across town to Fitzhenry Park—there was a part of it called the Silenus Gardens filled with stone benches and statuary where I always felt better—when I spied a familiar figure sitting down by the river west of the Pier: Paperjack.

The Kickaha River was named after that branch of the Algonquin language family that originally lived in this area before the white men came and took it all away from them. All the tribe had left now was a reservation north of the city and this river named after them. The Kickaha had its source north of the reserve and cut through the city on its way to the lake. In this part of town it separated the business section and commercial waterfront from the Beaches where the money lives.

There are houses in the Beaches that make the old stately homes in Lower Crowsea look like tenements, but you can’t see them from here. Looking west, all you see is green—first the City Commission’s manicured lawns on either side of the river, then the treed hills that hide the homes of the wealthy from the rest of us plebes. On the waterfront itself are a couple of country clubs and the private beaches of the really wealthy whose estates back right onto the water.

Paperjack was sitting on this side of the river, doing I don’t know what. From where I stood, I couldn’t tell. He seemed to be just sitting there on the riverbank, watching the slow water move past. I watched him for awhile, then hoisted my fiddlecase from where I’d leaned it against the wall and hopped down to the sand. When I got to where he was sitting, he looked up and gave me an easy, welcoming grin, as if he’d been expecting me to show up.

Running into him like this was fate, Jilly would say. I’ll stick to calling it coincidence. It’s a big city, but it isn’t that big.

Paperjack made a motion with his hand, indicating I should pull up a bit of lawn beside him. I hesitated for a moment—right up until then, I realized later, everything could have worked out differently.

But I made the choice and sat beside him.

There was a low wall, right down by the water, with rushes and lilies growing up against it. Among the lilies was a family of ducks—mother and a paddling of ducklings—and that was what Paperjack had been watching. He had an empty plastic bag in his hand, and the breadcrumbs that remained in the bottom told me he’d been feeding the ducks until his bread ran out.

He made another motion with his hand, touching the bag, then pointing to the ducks.

I shook my head. “I wasn’t planning on coming down,” I said, “so I didn’t bring anything to feed them.”

He nodded, understanding.

We sat quietly awhile longer. The ducks finally gave up on us and paddled farther up the river, looking for better pickings. Once they were gone, Paperjack turned to me again. He laid his hand against his heart, then raised his eyebrows questioningly.

Looking at that slim black hand with its long narrow fingers lying against his dark suit, I marveled again at the sheer depth of his ebony coloring. Even with the bit of a tan I’d picked up busking the last few weeks, I felt absolutely pallid beside him. Then I lifted my gaze to his eyes. If his skin swallowed light, I knew where it went: into his eyes. They were dark, so dark you could barely tell the difference between pupil and cornea, but inside their darkness was a kind of glow—a shine that resonated inside me like the deep hum that comes from my fiddle’s bass strings whenever I play one of those wild Shetland reels in A minor.

I suppose it’s odd, describing something visual in terms of sound, but right then, right at that moment, I heard the shine of his eyes, singing inside me. And I understood immediately what he’d meant by his gesture.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m feeling a little low.”

He touched his chest again, but it was a different, lighter gesture this time. I knew what that meant as well.

“There’s not much anybody can do about it,” I said.

Except Sam. She could come back. Or maybe if I just knew she’d been real ... But that opened a whole other line of thinking that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into again. I wanted her to have been real, I wanted her to come back, but if I accepted that, I also had to accept that ghosts were real and that the past could sneak up and steal someone from the present, taking them back into a time that had already been and gone.

Paperjack took his fortunetelling device out of the breast pocket of his jacket and gave me a questioning look. I started to shake my head, but before I could think about what I was doing, I just said,

“What the hell,” and let him do his stuff

I chose blue from the colors, because that was the closest to how I was feeling; he didn’t have any colors like confused or lost or foolish. I watched his fingers move the paper to spell out the color, then chose four from the numbers, because that’s how many strings my fiddle has. When his fingers stopped moving the second time, I picked seven for no particular reason at all.

He folded back the paper flap so I could read my fortune. All it said was: “Swallow the past.”

I didn’t get it. I thought it’d say something like that Bobby McFerrin song, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” What it did say didn’t make any sense at all.

“I don’t understand,” I told Paperjack. “What’s it supposed to mean?”

He just shrugged. Folding up the fortuneteller, he put it back in his pocket.

Swallow the past. Did that mean I was supposed to forget about it? Or ... well, swallow could also mean believe or accept. Was that what he was trying to tell me? Was he echoing July’s argument?

I thought about that photo in my fiddlecase, and then an idea came to me. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before. I grabbed my fiddlecase and stood up.

“I ...” I wanted to thank him, but somehow the words just escaped me. All that came out was, “I’ve gotta run.”

But I could tell he understood my gratitude. I wasn’t exactly sure what he’d done, except that that little message on his fortuneteller had put together a connection for me that I’d never seen before.

Fate, I could hear Jilly saying.

Paperjack smiled and waved me off.

I followed coincidence away from Paperjack and the riverbank and back up Battersfield Road to the Newford Public Library in Lower Crowsea.

Time does more than erode a riverbank or wear mountains down into tired hills. It takes the edge from our memories as well, overlaying everything with a soft focus so that it all blurs together. What really happened gets all jumbled up with the hopes and dreams we once had and what we wish had really happened. Did you ever run into someone you went to school with—someone you never really hung around with, but just passed in the halls, or had a class with—and they act like you were the best of buddies, because that’s how they remember it? For that matter, maybe you were buddies, and it’s you that’s remembering it wrong ....

Starting some solid detective work on what happened to Sam took the blur from my memories and brought her back into focus for me. The concepts of ghosts or people disappearing into the past just got pushed to one side, and all I thought about was Sam and tracking her down; if not the Sam I had known, then the woman she’d become in the past.

My friend Amy Scallan works at the library. She’s a tall, angular woman with russet hair and long fingers that would have stood her in good stead at a piano keyboard. Instead she took up the Uillean pipes, and we play together in an onagain, offagain band called Johnny Jump Up. Matt Casey, our third member, is the reason we’re not that regular a band.

Matt’s a brilliant bouzouki and guitar player and a fabulous singer, but he’s not got much in the way of social skills, and he’s way too cynical for my liking. Since he and I don’t really get along well, it makes rehearsals kind of tense at times. On the other hand, I love playing with Amy. She’s the kind of musician who has such a good time playing that you can’t help but enjoy yourself as well. Whenever I think of Amy, the first image that always comes to mind is of her rangy frame folded around her pipes, right elbow moving back and forth on the bellows to fill the bag under her left arm, those long fingers just dancing on the chanter, foot tapping, head bobbing, a grin on her face.

She always makes sure that the gig goes well, and we have a lot of fun, so it balances out I guess.

I showed her the picture I had of Sam. There was a street number on the porch’s support pillar to the right of the steps and enough of the house in the picture that I’d be able to match it up to the real thing. If I could find out what street it was on. If the house still existed.

“This could take forever,” Amy said as she laid the photo down on the desk.

“I’ve got the time.”

Amy laughed. “I suppose you do. I don’t know how you do it, Geordie. Everyone else in the world has to bust their buns to make a living, but you just cruise on through.”

“The trick’s having a low overhead,” I said.

Amy just rolled her eyes. She’d been to my apartment, and there wasn’t much to see: a spare fiddle hanging on the wall with a couple of Dilly’s paintings; some tune books with tattered covers and some changes of clothing; one of those oldfashioned record players that had the turntable and speakers all in one unit and a few albums leaning against the side of the apple crate it sat on; a couple of bows that desperately needed rehairing; the handful of used paperbacks I’d picked up for the week’s reading from Duffy’s Used Books over on Walker Street; and a little beatup old cassette machine with a handful of tapes.

And that was it. I got by.

I waited at the desk while Amy got the books we needed. She came back with an armload. Most had Newford in the title, but a few also covered that period of time when the city was still called Yoors, after the Dutchman Diederick van Yoors, who first settled the area in the early 1800s. It got changed to Newford back around the turn of the century, so all that’s left now to remind the city of its original founding father is a street name.

Setting the books down before me on the desk, Amy went off into the stacks to look for some more obscure titles. I didn’t wait for her to get back, but went ahead and started flipping through the first book on the pile, looking carefully at the pictures.

I started off having a good time. There’s a certain magic in old photos, especially when they’re of the place where you grew up. They cast a spell over you. Dirt roads where now there was pavement, sided by office complexes. The old Brewster Theatre in its heyday—I remembered it as the place where I first saw Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan, and later allnight movie festivals, but the Williamson Street Mall stood there now. Boating parties on the river. Old City Hall—it was a youth hostel these days.

But my enthusiasm waned with the afternoon. By the time the library closed, I was no closer to getting a street name for the house in Sam’s photo than I had been when I came in. Amy gave me a sympathetic “I told you so” look when we separated on the front steps of the library. I just told her I’d see her tomorrow.

I had something to eat at Kathryn’s Cafe. I’d gone there hoping to see Jilly, only I’d forgotten it was her night off. I tried calling her when I’d finished eating, but she was out. So I took my fiddle over to the theatre district and worked the crowds waiting in line there for an a hour or so before I headed off for home, my pockets heavy with change.

That night, just before I fell asleep, I felt like a hole sort of opened in the air above my bed. Lying there, I found myself touring New—

ford—just floating through its streets. Though the time was the present, there was no color.

Everything appeared in the same sepia tones as in my photo of Sam.

I don’t remember when I finally did fall asleep.

The next morning I was at the library right when it opened, carrying two cups of takeout coffee in a paper bag, one of which I offered to Amy when I got to her desk. Amy muttered something like, “when owls prowl the day, they shouldn’t look so bloody cheerful about it,” but she accepted the coffee and cleared a corner of her desk so that I could get back to the books.

In the photo I had of Sam there was just the edge of a bay window visible beside the porch, with fairly unique rounded gingerbread trim running offfrom either side ofits keystone. I’d thought it would be the clue to tracking down the place. It looked almost familiar, but I was no longer sure ifthat was because I’d actually seen the house at some time, or it was just from looking at the photo so much.

Unfortunately, those details weren’t helping at all.

“You know, there’s no guarantee you’re going to find a picture of the house you’re looking for in those books,” Amy said around midmorning when she was taking her coffee break. “They didn’t exactly go around taking pictures of everything.”

I was at the last page of Walks Through Old Crowsea. Closing the book, I set it on the finished pile beside my chair and then leaned back, lacing my fingers behind my head. My shoulders were stiff from sitting hunched over a desk all morning.

“I know. I’m going to give Jack a call when I’m done here to see if I can borrow his bike this afternoon.”

“You’re going to pedal all around town looking for this house?”

“What else can I do?”

“There’s always the archives at the main library.”

I nodded, feeling depressed. It had seemed like such a good idea yesterday. It was still a good idea.

I just hadn’t realized how long it would take.

“Or you could go someplace like the Market and show the photo around to some of the older folks.

Maybe one of them will remember the place.”

“I suppose.”

I picked up the next book, The Architectural Heritage of Old Yoors, and went back to work.

And there it was, on page thirtyeight. The house. There were three buildings in a row in the photo; the one I’d been looking for was the middle one. I checked the caption: “Grasso Street, circa 1920.”

“I don’t believe it,” Amy said. I must have made some kind of a noise, because she was looking up at me from her own work. “You found it, didn’t you?” she added.

“I think so. Have you got a magnifying glass?”

She passed it over, and I checked out the street number of the middle house. Oneforty-two. The same as in my photo.

Amy took over then. She phoned a friend who worked in the land registry office. He called back a half hour later and gave us the name of the owner in 1912, when my photo had been taken: Edward Dickenson. The house had changed hands a number of times since the Dickensons had sold it in the forties.

We checked the phone book, but there were over a hundred Dickensons listed, twelve with just an initial “E” and one Ed. None of the addresses were on Grasso Street.

“Which makes sense,” Amy said, “since they sold the place fifty years ago.”

I wanted to run by that block on Grasso where the house was—I’d passed it I don’t know how many times, and never paid much attention to it or any of its neighbors—but I needed more background on the Dickensons first. Amy showed me how to run the microfiche, and soon I was going through back issues of The Newford Star and The Daily Journal, concentrating on the local news sections and the gossip columns.

The first photo of Edward Dickenson that came up was in The Daily Journal, the June 21st, 1913, issue. He was standing with the Dean of Butler University at some opening ceremony. I compared him to the people with Sam in my photo and found him standing behind her to her left.

Now that I was on the right track, I began to work in a kind of frenzy. I whipped through the microfiche, making notes of every mention of the Dickensons. Edward turned out to have been a stockbroker, one of the few who didn’t lose his shirt in subsequent market crashes. Back then the money lived in Lower Crowsea, mostly on McKennitt, Grasso, and Stanton Streets. Edward made the papers about once a month—business deals, society galas, fundraising events, political dinners, and the like. It wasn’t until I hit the October 29, 1915, issue of The Newford Star that I had the wind knocked out of my sails.

It was the picture that got to me: Sam and a man who was no stranger. I’d seen him before. He was the ghost that had stepped out of the past and stolen her away. Under the photo was a caption announcing the engagement of Thomas Edward Dickenson, son of the wellknown local businessman, to Samantha Rey.

In the picture of Sam that I had, Dickenson wasn’t there with the rest of the people—he’d probably taken it. But here he was. Real. With Sam. I couldn’t ignore it.

Back then they didn’t have the technology to make a photograph lie.

There was a weird buzzing in my ears as that picture burned its imprint onto my retinas. It was hard to breathe, and my Tshirt suddenly seemed too tight.

I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but I knew it wasn’t this. I suppose I thought I’d track down the people in the picture and find out that the woman who looked like Sam was actually named Gertrude somethingor-other, and she’d lived her whole life with that family. I didn’t expect to find Sam. I didn’t expect the ghost to have been real.

I was in a daze as I put away the microfiche and shut down the machine.

“Geordie?” Amy asked as I walked by her desk. “Are you okay?”

I remember nodding and muttering something about needing a break. I picked up my fiddle and headed for the front door. The next thing I remember is standing in front of the address on Grasso Street and looking at the Dickensons’ house.

I had no idea who owned it now; I hadn’t been paying much attention to Amy after she told me that the Dickensons had sold it. Someone had renovated it fairly recently, so it didn’t look at all the same as in the photos, but under its trendy additions, I could see the lines of the old house.

I sat down on the curb with my fiddlecase across my knees and just stared at the building. The buzzing was back in my head. My shirt still felt too tight.

I didn’t know what to do anymore, so I just sat there, trying to make sense out of what couldn’t be reasoned away. I no longer had any doubt that Sam had been real, or that a ghost had stolen her away.

The feeling of loss came back all over again, as if it had happened just now, not three years ago. And what scared me was, if she and the ghost were real, then what else might be?

I closed my eyes, and headlines of supermarket tabloids flashed across my eyes, a strobing flicker of bizarre images and words. That was the world Jilly lived in—one in which anything was possible. I didn’t know if I could handle living in that kind of world. I needed rules and boundaries. Patterns.

It was a long time before I got up and headed for Kathryn’s Cafe.

The first thing Jilly asked when I got in the door was, “Have you seen Paperjack?”

It took me a few moments to push back the clamor of my own thoughts to register what she’d asked.

Finally I just shook my head.

“He wasn’t at St. Paul’s today,” Ply went on, “and he’s always there, rain or shine, winter or summer. I didn’t think he was looking well yesterday, and now ...”

I tuned her out and took a seat at an empty table before I could fall down. That feeling of dislocation that had started up in me when I first saw Sam’s photo in the microfiche kept coming and going in waves.

It was cresting right now, and I found it hard to just sit in the chair, let alone listen to what Jilly was saying. I tuned her back in when the spaciness finally started to recede.

.. heart attack, who would he call? He can’t speak.”

“I saw him yesterday,” I said, surprised that my voice sounded so calm. “Around midafternoon. He seemed fine.”

“He did?”

I nodded. “He was down by the Pier, sitting on the riverbank, feeding the ducks. He read my fortune.”

“He did?”

“You’re beginning to sound like a broken record, Jilly.”

For some reason, I was starting to feel better. That sense of being on the verge of a panic attack faded and then disappeared completely. Jilly pulled up a chair and leaned across the table, elbows propped up, chin cupped in her hands.

“So tell me,” she said. “What made you do it? What was your fortune?”

I told her everything that had happened since I had seen Paperjack. That sense of dislocation came and went again a few times while I talked, but mostly I was holding firm.

“Holy shit!” Jilly said when I was done.

She put her hand to her mouth and looked quickly around, but none of the customers seemed to have noticed. She reached a hand across the table and caught one of mine.

“So now you believe?” she asked.

“I don’t have a whole lot of choice, do I?”

“What are you going to do?”

I shrugged. “What’s to do? I found out what I needed to know—now I’ve got to learn to live with it and all the other baggage that comes with it.”

Jilly didn’t say anything for a long moment. She just held my hand and exuded comfort as only Jilly can.

“You could find her,” she said finally.

“Who? Sam?”

“Who else?”

“She’s probably—” I stumbled over the word dead and settled for—not even alive anymore.”

“Maybe not,” Jilly said. “She’d definitely be old. But don’t you think you should find out?”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. And if she were alive, I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet her. What could we say to each other? “Think about it, anyway,” Jilly said.

That was Jilly; she never took no for an answer.

“I’m off at eight,” she said. “Do you want to meet me then?”

“What’s up?” I asked, halfheartedly.

“I thought maybe you’d help me find Paperjack.”

I might as well, I thought. I was becoming a bit of an expert in tracking people down by this point.

Maybe I should get a card printed: Geordie Riddell, Private Investigations and Fiddle Tunes.

“Sure,” I told her.

“Great,” Jilly said.

She bounced up from her seat as a couple of new customers came into the cafe. I ordered a coffee from her after she’d gotten them seated, then stared out the window at the traffic going by on Battersfield. I tried not to think of Sam—trapped in the past, making a new life for herself there—but I might as well have tried to jump to the moon.

By the time filly came off shift I was feeling almost myself again, but instead of being relieved, I had this great load of guilt hanging over me. It all centered around Sam and the ghost. I’d denied her once.

Now I felt as though I was betraying her all over again. Knowing what I knew—the photo accompanying the engagement notice in that old issue of The Newford Star flashed across my mind—the way I was feeling at the moment didn’t seem right. I felt too normal; and so the guilt.

“I don’t get it,” I said to Jilly as we walked down Battersfield towards the Pier. “This afternoon I was falling to pieces, but now I just feel ...”

“Calm?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s because you’ve finally stopped fighting yourself and accepted that what you saw—what you remember—really happened. It was denial that was screwing you up.”

She didn’t add, “I told you so,” but she didn’t have to. It echoed in my head anyway, joining the rest of the guilt I was carrying around with me. If I’d only listened to her with an open mind, then ... what?

I wouldn’t be going through this all over again?

We crossed Lakeside Drive and made our way through the closed concession and souvenir stands to the beach. When we reached the Pier, I led her westward to where I’d last seen Paperjack, but he wasn’t sitting by the river anymore. A lone duck regarded us hopefully, but neither of us had thought to bring any bread.

“So I track down Sam,” I said, still more caught up in my personal quest than in looking for Paperjack. “If she’s not dead, she’ll be an old lady. If I find her—then what?”

“You’ll complete the circle,” Jilly said. She looked away from the river and faced me, her pixie features serious. “It’s like the Kickaha say: everything is on a wheel. You stepped off the one that represents your relationship with Sam before it came full circle. Until you complete your turn on it, you’ll never have peace of mind.”

“When do you know you’ve come full circle?” I asked.

“You’ll know.”

She turned away before I could go on and started back towards the Pier. By day the place was crowded and full of noise, alive with tourists and people out relaxing, just looking to have a good time; by night, its occupancy was turned over to gangs of kids, fooling around on skateboards or simply hanging out, and the homeless: winos, bag ladies, hoboes, and the like.

Jilly worked the crowd, asking after Paperjack, while I followed in her wake. Everybody knew him, or had seen him in the past week, but no one knew where he was now, or where he lived. We were about to give up and head over to Fitzhenry Park to start over again with the people hanging out there, when we heard the sound of a harmonica. It was playing the blues, a soft, mournful sound that drifted up from the beach.

We made for the nearest stairs and then walked back across the sand to find the Bossman sitting under the boardwalk, hands cupped around his instrument, head bowed down, eyes closed. There was no one listening to him except us. The people with money to throw in his old cloth cap were having dinner now in the fancy restaurants across Lakeside Drive or over in the theatre district. He was just playing for himself.

When he was busking, he stuck to popular pieces—whatever was playing on the radio mixed with old show tunes, jazz favorites, and that kind of thing. The music that came from his harmonica now was pure magic. It transformed him, making him larger than life. The blues he played held all the world’s sorrows in its long sliding notes and didn’t so much change it, as make it bearable.

My fingers itched to pull out my fiddle and join him, but we hadn’t come to jam. So we waited until he was done. The last note hung in the air for far longer than seemed possible, then he brought his hands away from his mouth and cradled the harmonica on his lap. He looked up at us from under drooping eyelids, the magic disap—

pearing now that he’d stopped playing. He was just an old, homeless black man now, with the faint trace of a smile touching his lips. “Hey, Jill—Geordie,” he said. “What’s doin’?”

“We’re looking for Paperjack,” Jilly told him.

The Bossman nodded. “Jack’s the man for paperwork, all right.”

“I’ve been worried about him,” Jilly said. “About his health.”

“You a doctor now, Jill?”

She shook her head.

“Anybody got a smoke?”

This time we both shook our heads.

From his pocket he pulled a halfsmoked butt that he must have picked up off the boardwalk earlier, then lit it with a wooden match that he struck on the zipper of his jeans. He took a long drag and let it out so that the bluegrey smoke wreathed his head, studying us all the while.

“You care too much, you just get hurt,” he said finally.

Jilly nodded. “I know. But I can’t help it. Do you know where we can find him?

“Well now. Come winter, he lives with a Mex family down in the Barrio.”

“And in the summer?”

The Bossman shrugged. “I heard once he’s got himself a camp up behind the Beaches.”

“Thanks,” Jilly said.

“He might not take to uninvited guests,” the Bossman added. “Body gets himself an outof-theway squat like that, I’d think he be lookin’ for privacy.”

“I don’t want to intrude,” Jilly assured him. “I just want to make sure he’s okay.”

The Bossman nodded. “You’re a standup kind of lady, Jill. I’ll trust you to do what’s right. I’ve been thinkin’ old Jack’s lookin’ a little peaked myself. It’s somethin’ in his eyes—like just makin’ do is gettin’ to be a chore. But you take care, goin’ back up in there. Some of the ‘boes, they’re not real accommodatin’ to havin’ strangers on their turf.”

“We’ll be careful,” Jilly said.

The Bossman gave us both another long, thoughtful look, then lifted his harmonica and started to play again. Its mournful sound followed us back up to the boardwalk and seemed to trail us all the way to Lakeside Drive where we walked across the bridge to get to the other side of the Kickaha.

I don’t know what Jilly was thinking about, but I was going over what she’d told me earlier. I kept thinking about wheels and how they turned.

Once past the City Commission’s lawns on the far side of the river, the land starts to climb. It’s just a lot of rough scrub on this side of the hills that make up the Beaches and every summer some of the hoboes and other homeless people camp out in it. The cops roust them from time to time, but mostly they’re left alone, and they keep to themselves.

Going in there I was more nervous than Jilly; I don’t think she’s scared of anything. The sun had gone down behind the hills, and while it was twilight in the city, here it was already dark. I know a lot of the street people and get along with them better than most—everyone likes a good fiddle tune—but some of them could look pretty rough, and I kept anticipating that we’d run into some big wildeyed hillbilly who’d take exception to our being there.

Well, we did run into one, but—like ninety percent of the street people in Newford—he was somebody that Jilly knew. He seemed pleased, if a little surprised to find her here, grinning at us in the fading light. He was a tall, bigshouldered man, dressed in dirty jeans and a flannel shirt, with big hobnailed boots on his feet and a shock of red hair that fell to his neck and stood up on top of his head in matted tangles. His name, appropriately enough, was Red. The smell that emanated from him made me want to shift position until I was standing upwind.

He not only knew where Paperjack’s camp was, but took us there, only Paperjack wasn’t home.

The place had Paperjack stamped all over it. There was a neatly rolled bedroll pushed up against a knapsack which probably held his changes of clothing. We didn’t check it out, because we weren’t there to go through his stuff: Behind the pack was a food cooler with a Coleman stove sitting on top of it, and everywhere you could see small origami stars that hung from the tree branches. There must have been over a hundred of them. I felt as if I were standing in the middle of space with stars all around me.

Jilly left a note for Paperjack, then we followed Red back out to Lakeside Drive. He didn’t wait for our thanks. He just drifted away as soon as we reached the mown lawns that bordered the bush.

We split up then. Jilly had work to do—some art for Newford’s entertainment weekly, In the City—and I didn’t feel like tagging along to watch her work at her studio. She took the subway, but I decided to walk. I was bonetired by then, but the night was one of those perfect ones when the city seems to be smiling. You can’t see the dirt or the grime for the sparkle over everything. After all I’d been through today, I didn’t want to be cooped up inside anywhere. I just wanted to enjoy the night.

I remember thinking about how Sam would’ve loved to be out walking with me on a night like this—the old Sam I’d lost, not necessarily the one she’d become. I didn’t know that Sam at all, and I still wasn’t sure I wanted to, even if I could track her down.

When I reached St. Paul’s, I paused by the steps. Even though it was a perfect night to be out walking, something drew me inside. I tried the door, and it opened soundlessly at my touch. I paused just inside the door, one hand resting on the back pew, when I heard a cough.

I froze, ready to take flight. I wasn’t sure how churches worked. Maybe my creeping around here at this time of night was ... I don’t know, sacrilegious or something.

I looked up to the front and saw that someone was sitting in the foremost pew. The cough was repeated, and I started down the aisle.

Intuitively, I guess I knew I’d find him here. Why else had I come inside?

Paperjack nodded to me as I sat down beside him on the pew. I laid my fiddlecase by my feet and leaned back. I wanted to ask after his health, to tell him how worried Jill was about him, but my day caught up with me in a rush. Before I knew it, I was nodding off.

I knew I was dreaming when I heard the voice. I had to be dreaming, because there was only Paperjack and I sitting on the pew, and Paperjack was mute. But the voice had the sound that I’d always imagined Paperjack’s would have if he could speak. It was like the movement of his fingers when he was folding origami—quick, but measured and certain. Resonant, like his finished paper sculptures that always seemed to have more substance to them than just their folds and shapes.

“No one in this world views it the same,” the voice said. “I believe that is what amazes me the most about it. Each person has his or her own vision of the world, and whatever lies outside that worldview becomes invisible. The rich ignore the poor. The happy can’t see those who are hurting.”

“Paperjack ... ?” I asked.

There was only silence in reply.

“I ... I thought you couldn’t talk.”

“So a man who has nothing he wishes to articulate is considered mute,” the voice went on as though I hadn’t interrupted. “It makes me weary.”

“Who ... who are you?” I asked.

“A mirror into which no one will look. A fortune that remains forever unread. My time here is done.”

The voice fell silent again.

“Paperjack?”

Still silence.

It was just a dream, I told myself I tried to wake myself from it. I told myself that the pew was made of hard, unyielding wood, and far too uncomfortable to sleep on. And Paperjack needed help. I remembered the cough and Jilly’s worries.

But I couldn’t wake up.

“The giving itself is the gift,” the voice said suddenly. It sounded as though it came from the back of the church, or even farther away. “The longer I remain here, the more I forget.”

Then the voice went away for good. I lost it in a dreamless sleep.

I woke early, and all my muscles were stiff. My watch said it was ten to six. I had a moment’s disorientation—where the hell was I?—and then I remembered. Paperjack. And the dream.

I sat up straighter in the pew, and something fell from my lap to the floor. A piece of folded paper. I bent stiffly to retrieve it, turning it over and over in my hands, holding it up to the dim grey light that was creeping in through the windows. It was one of Paperjack’s Chinese fortunetellers.

After awhile I fit my fingers into the folds of the paper and looked down at the colors. I chose blue, same as I had the last time, and spelled it out, my fingers moving the paper back and forth so that it looked like a flower speaking soundlessly to me. I picked numbers at random, then unfolded the flap to read what it had to say.

“The question is more important than the answer,” it said.

I frowned, puzzling over it, then looked at what I would have gotten if I’d picked another number, but all the other folds were blank when I turned them over. I stared at it, then folded the whole thing back up and stuck it in my pocket. I was starting to get a serious case of the creeps.

Picking up my fiddlecase, I left St. Paul’s and wandered over to Chinatown. I had breakfast in an allnight diner, sharing the place with a bunch of bluecollar workers who were all talking about some baseball game they’d watched the night before. I thought of calling Jilly, but knew that if she’d been working all night on that In the City assignment, she’d be crashed out now and wouldn’t appreciate a phone call.

I dawdled over breakfast, then slowly made my way up to that part of Foxville that’s called the Rosses. That’s where the Irish immigrants all lived in the forties and fifties. The place started changing in the sixties when a lot of hippies who couldn’t afford the rents in Crowsea moved in, and it changed again with a new wave of immigrants from Vietnam and the Caribbean in the following decades. But the area, for all its changes, was still called the Rosses. My apartment was in the heart of it, right where Kelly Street meets Lee and crosses the Kickaha River. It’s two doors down from The Harp, the only real Irish pub in town, which makes it convenient for me to get to the Irish music sessions on Sunday afternoons.

My phone was ringing when I got home. I was halfexpecting it to be Jilly, even though it was only going on eight, but found myself talking to a reporter from The Daily Journal instead. His name was Ian Begley, and it turned out he was a friend of Jilly’s. She’d asked him to run down what information he could on the Dickensons in the paper’s morgue.

“Old man Dickenson was the last real businessman of the family,” Begley told me. “Their fortunes started to decline when his son Tom took over—he’s the one who married the woman that Jilly said you were interested in tracking down. He died in 1976. I don’t have an obit on his widow, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s still alive. If she moved out of town, the paper wouldn’t have an obit for her unless the family put one in.”

He told me a lot of other stuff, but I was only half listening. The business with Paperjack last night and the fortunetelling device this morning were still eating away at me. I did take down the address of Sam’s granddaughter when it came up. Begley ran out of steam after another five minutes or so.

“You got enough there?” he asked.

I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me. “Yeah. Thanks a lot.”

“Say hello to Jilly for me and tell her she owes me one.”

After I hung up, I looked out the window for a long time. I managed to shift gears from Paperjack to thinking about what Begley had told me, about wheels, about Sam. Finally I got up and took a shower and shaved. I put on my cleanest jeans and shirt and shrugged on a sports jacket that had seen better days before I bought it in a retro fashion shop. I thought about leaving my fiddle behind, but knew I’d feel naked without it—I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone somewhere without it. The leather handle felt comforting in my hand as I hefted the case and went out the door.

All the way over to the address Begley had given me I tried to think of what I was going to say when I met Sam’s granddaughter. The truth would make me sound like I was crazy, but I couldn’t seem to concoct a story that would make sense.

I remember wondering—where was my brother when I needed him? Christy was never at a loss for words, no matter what the situation.

It wasn’t until I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the house that I decided to stick as close to the truth as I could—I was an old friend of her grandmother’s, could she put me in touch with her?—and take it from there. But even my vague plans went out the door when I rang the bell and stood faceto-face with Sam’s granddaughter.

Maybe you saw this coming, but it was the last thing I’d expected. The woman had Sam’s hair, Sam’s eyes, Sam’s face ... to all intents and purposes it was Sam standing there, looking at me with that vaguely uncertain expression that most of us wear when we open the door to a stranger standing on our steps.

My chest grew so tight I could barely breathe, and suddenly I could hear the sound of rain in my memory—it was always raining when Sam saw the ghost; it was raining the night he stole her away into the past.

Ghosts. I was looking at a ghost.

The woman’s expression was starting to change, the uncertainty turning into nervousness. There was no recognition in her eyes. As she began to step back—in a moment she’d close the door in my face, probably call the cops—I found my voice. I knew what I was going to say—I was going to ask about her grandmother—but all that came out was her name: “Sam.”

“Yes?” she said. She looked at me a little more carefully. “Do I know you?”

Jesus, even the name was the same.

A hundred thoughts were going through my head, but they all spiraled down into one mad hope: this was Sam. We could be together again. Then a child appeared behind the woman. She was a little girl no more than five, blondehaired, blueeyed, just like her mother—just like her mother’s grandmother.

Reality came crashing down around me.

This Sam wasn’t the woman I knew. She was married, she had children, she had a life.

“I ... I knew your grandmother,” I said. “We were ... we used to be friends.”

It sounded so inane to my ears, almost crazy. What would her grandmother—a woman maybe three times my age if she was still alive—have to do with a guy like me?

The woman’s gaze traveled down to my fiddlecase. “Is your name Geordie? Geordie Riddell?”

I blinked in surprise, then nodded slowly.

The woman smiled a little sadly, mostly with her eyes.

“Granny said you’d come by,” she said. “She didn’t know when, but she said you’d come by one day.” She stepped away from the door, shooing her daughter down the hall. “Would you like to come in?”

“I ... uh, sure.”

She led me into a living room that was furnished in mismatched antiques that, taken all together, shouldn’t have worked, but did.

The little girl perched in a Morris chair and watched me curiously as I sat down and set my fiddlecase down by my feet. Her mother pushed back a stray lock with a mannerism so like Sam’s that my chest tightened up even more.

“Would you like some coffee or tea?” she asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t want to intrude. I I ...” Words escaped me again.

“You’re not intruding,” she said. She sat down on the couch in front of me, that sad look back in her eyes. “My grandmother died a few years ago—she’d moved to New England in the late seventies, and she died there in her sleep. Because she loved it so much, we buried her there in a small graveyard overlooking the sea.”

I could see it in my mind as she spoke. I could hear the sound of the waves breaking on the shore below, the spray falling on the rocks like rain.

“She and I were very close, a lot closer than I ever felt to my mother.” She gave me a rueful look.

“You know how it is.”

She didn’t seem to be expecting a response, but I nodded anyway.

“When her estate was settled, most of her personal effects came to me. I ...” She paused, then stood up. “Excuse me for a moment, would you?”

I nodded again. She’d looked sad, talking about Sam. I hoped that bringing it all up hadn’t made her cry.

The little girl and I sat in silence, looking at each other until her mother returned. She was such a serious kid, her big eyes taking everything in; she sat quietly, not running around or acting up like most kids do when there’s someone new in the house that they can show off to. I didn’t think she was shy; she was just ... well, serious.

Her mother had a package wrapped in brown paper and twine in her hands when she came back.

She sat down across from me again and laid the package on the table between us.

“Granny told me a story once,” she said, “about her first and only real true love. It was an odd story, a kind of ghost story, about how she’d once lived in the future until granddad’s love stole her away from her own time and brought her to his.” She gave me an apologetic smile. “I knew it was just a story because, when I was growing up I’d met people she’d gone to school with, friends from her past before she met granddad. Besides, it was too much like some science fiction story.

“But it was true, wasn’t it?”

I could only nod. I didn’t understand how Sam and everything about her except my memories of her could vanish into the past, how she could have a whole new set of memories when she got back there, but I knew it was true.

I accepted it now, just as Jilly had been trying to get me to do for years. When I looked at Sam’s granddaughter, I saw that she accepted it as well.

“When her effects were sent to me,” she went on, “I found this package in them. It’s addressed to you.”

I had seen my name on it, written in a familiar hand. My own hand trembled as I reached over to pick it up.

“You don’t have to open it now,” she said.

I was grateful for that.

“I ... I’d better go,” I said and stood up. “Thank you for taking the time to see me.”

That sad smile was back as she saw me to the door.

“I’m glad I got the chance to meet you,” she said when I stepped out onto the porch.

I wasn’t sure I could say the same. She looked so much like Sam, sounded so much like Sam, that it hurt.

“I don’t think we’ll be seeing each other again,” she added. No. She had her husband, her family. I had my ghosts. “Thanks,” I said again and started off down the walk, fiddlecase in one hand, the brown paper package in the other.

I didn’t open the package until I was sitting in the Silenus Gardens in Fitzhenry Park, a place that always made me feel good; I figured I was going to need all the help I could get. Inside there was a book with a short letter. The book I recognized. It was the small J. M. Dent & Sons edition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that I’d given Sam because I’d known it was one of her favorite stories.

There was nothing special about the edition, other than its size—it was small enough for her to carry around in her purse, which she did. The inscription I’d written to her was inside, but the book was far more worn than it had been when I’d first given it to her. I didn’t have to open the book to remember that famous quotation from Puck’s final lines:

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumber’d here, While these visions did appear. And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream ...

But it hadn’t been a dream—not for me, and not for Sam. I set the book down beside me on the stone bench and unfolded the letter.

“Dear Geordie,” it said. “I know you’ll read this one day, and I hope you can forgive me for not seeing you in person, but I wanted you to remember me as I was, not as I’ve become. I’ve had a full and mostly happy life; you know my only regret. I can look back on our time together with the wisdom of an old woman now and truly know that all things have their time. Ours was short—too short, my heart—but we did have it.

“Who was it that said, ‘better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all’? We loved and lost each other, but I would rather cherish the memory than rail against the unfairness. I hope you will do the same.”

I sat there and cried. I didn’t care about the looks I was getting from people walking by, I just let it all out. Some of my tears were for what I’d lost, some were for Sam and her bravery, and some were for my own stupidity at denying her memory for so long.

I don’t know how long I sat there like that, holding her letter, but the tears finally dried on my cheeks.

I heard the scuff of feet on the path and wasn’t surprised to look up and find Jilly standing in front of me.

“Oh Geordie, me lad,” she said.

She sat down at my side and leaned against me. I can’t tell you how comforting it was to have her there. I handed her the letter and book and sat quietly while she read the first and looked at the latter.

Slowly she folded up the letter and slipped it inside the book.

“How do you feel now?” she asked finally. “Better or worse?”

“Both.”

She raised her eyebrows in a silent question.

“Well, it’s like what they say funerals are for,” I tried to explain. “It gives you the chance to say goodbye, to settle things, like taking a—” I looked at her and managed to find a small smile “—final turn on a wheel. But I feel depressed about Sam. I know what we had was real, and I know how it felt for me, losing her. But I only had to deal with it for a few years. She carried it for a lifetime.”

“Still, she carried on.”

I nodded. “Thank god for that.”

Neither of us spoke for awhile, but then I remembered Paperjack. I told her what I thought had happened last night, then showed her the fortunetelling device that he’d left with me in St. Paul’s. She read my fortune with pursed lips and the start of a wrinkle on her forehead, but didn’t seem particularly surprised by it.

“What do you think?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Everybody makes the same mistake. Fortunetelling doesn’t reveal the future; it mirrors the present. It resonates against what your subconscious already knows and hauls it up out of the darkness so that you can get a good look at it.”

“I meant about Paperjack.”

“I think he’s gone—back to wherever it was that he came from.” She was beginning to exasperate me in that way that only she could.

“But who was he?” I asked. “No, better yet, what was he?”

“I don’t know,” jilly said. “I just know it’s like your fortune said. It’s the questions we ask, the journey we take to get where we’re going that’s more important than the actual answer. It’s good to have mysteries. It reminds us that there’s more to the world than just making do and having a bit of fun.”

I sighed, knowing I wasn’t going to get much more sense out of her than that.

It wasn’t until the next day that I made my way alone to Paperjack’s camp in back of the Beaches.

All his gear was gone, but the paper stars still hung from the trees. I wondered again about who he was.

Some oracular spirit, a kind of guardian angel, drifting around, trying to help people see themselves? Or an old homeless black man with a gift for folding paper? I understood then that my fortune made a certain kind of sense, but I didn’t entirely agree with it.

Still, in Sam’s case, knowing the answer had brought me peace.

I took Paperjack’s fortuneteller from my pocket and strung it with a piece of string I’d brought along for that purpose. Then I hung it on the branch of a tree so that it could swing there, in among all those paper stars, and I walked away.