Dreams Underfoot

Time Skip

Every time it rains a ghost comes walking.

He goes up by the stately old houses that line Stanton Street, down Henratty Lane to where it leads into the narrow streets and crowded backalleys of Crowsea, and then back up Stanton again in an unvarying routine.

He wears a worn tweed suit—mostly browns and greys with a faint rosy touch of heather. A shapeless cap presses down his brown curls. His features give no true indication of his age, while his eyes are both innocent and wise. His face gleams in the rain, slick and wet as that of a living person. When he reaches the streetlamp in front of the old Hamill estate, he wipes his eyes with a brown hand. Then he fades away.

Samantha Rey knew it was true because she’d seen him. More than once.

She saw him every time it rained.

“So, have you asked her out yet?” Jilly wanted to know.

We were sitting on a park bench, feeding pigeons the leftover crusts from our lunches. Jilly had worked with me at the post office, that Christmas they hired outside staff instead of letting the regular employees work the overtime, and we’d been friends ever since. These days she worked three nights a week as a waitress, while I made what I could busking on the Market with my father’s old Czech fiddle.

Jilly was slender, with a thick tangle of brown hair and pale blue eyes, electric as sapphires. She had a penchant for loose clothing and fingerless gloves when she wasn’t waitressing. There were times, when I met her on the streets in the evening, that I mistook her for a bag lady: skulking in an alleyway, gaze alternating between the sketchbook held in one hand and the faces of the people on the streets as they walked by. She had more sketches of me playing my fiddle than had any right to exist.

“She’s never going to know how you feel until you talk to her about it,” Jilly went on when I didn’t answer.

“I know.”

I’ll make no bones about it: I was putting the make on Sam Rey and had been ever since she’d started to work at Gypsy Records half a year ago. I never much went in for the blonde California beach girl type, but Sam had a look all her own. She had some indefinable quality that went beyond her basic cheerleader appearance. Right. I can hear you already. Rationalizations of the North American libido.

But it was true. I didn’t just want Sam in my bed; I wanted to know we were going to have a future together. I wanted to grow old with her. I wanted to build up a lifetime of shared memories.

About the most Sam knew about all this was that I hung around and talked to her a lot at the record store.

“Look,” Jilly said. “Just because she’s pretty, doesn’t mean she’s having a perfect life or anything.

Most guys look at someone like her and they won’t even approach her because they’re sure she’s got men coming out of her ears. Well, it doesn’t always work that way. For instance—” she touched her breastbone with a narrow hand and smiled “—consider yours truly.”

I looked at her long fingers. Paint had dried under her nails. “You’ve started a new canvas,” I said.

“And you’re changing the subject,” she replied. “Come on, Geordie. What’s the big deal? The most she can say is no.”

“Well, yeah. But ...”

“She intimidates you, doesn’t she?”

I shook my head. “I talk to her all the time.”

“Right. And that’s why I’ve got to listen to your constant mooning over her.” She gave me a sudden considering look, then grinned. “I’ll tell you what, Geordie, me lad. Here’s the bottom line: I’ll give you twentyfour hours to ask her out. If you haven’t got it together by then, I’ll talk to her myself “

“Don’t even joke about it.”

“Twentyfour hours,” Jilly said firmly. She looked at the chocolate-chip cookie in my hand. “Are you eating that?” she added in that certain tone of voice of hers that plainly said, all previous topics of conversation have been dealt with and completed. We are now changing topics.

So we did. But all the while we talked, I thought about going into the record store and asking Sam out, because if I didn’t, Jilly would do it for me. Whatever else she might be, Jilly wasn’t shy. Having her go in to plead my case would be as bad as having my mother do it for me. I’d never been able to show my face in there again.

Gypsy Records is on Williamson Street, one of the city’s main arteries. It begins as Highway 14

outside the city, lined with a sprawl of fast food outlets, malls and warehouses. On its way downtown, it begins to replace the commercial properties with everincreasing handfuls of residential blocks until it reaches the downtown core where shops and lowrise apartments mingle in gossiping crowds.

The store gets its name from John Butler, a short roundbellied man without a smidgen of Romany blood, who began his business out of the back of a handdrawn cart that gypsied its way through the city’s streets for years, always keeping just one step ahead of the municipal licensing board’s agents.

While it carries the usual bestsellers, the lifeblood of its sales are more obscure titles—imports and albums published by independent record labels. Albums, singles and compact discs of punk, traditional folk, jazz, heavy metal and alternative music line its shelves. Barring Sam, most of those who work there would look just as at home in the fashion pages of the most current British alternative fashion magazines.

Sam was wearing a blue cotton dress today, embroidered with silver threads. Her blonde hair was cut in a short shag on the top, hanging down past her shoulders at the back and sides. She was dealing with a defect when I came in. I don’t know if the record in question worked or not, but the man returning it was definitely defective.

“It sounds like there’s a radio broadcast right in the middle of the song,” he was saying as he tapped the cover of the Pink Floyd album on the counter between them.

“It’s supposed to be there,” Sam explained. “It’s part of the song.” The tone of her voice told me that this conversation was going into its twelfth round or so.

“Well, I don’t like it,” the man told her. “When I buy an album of music, I expect to get just music on it.”

“You still can’t return it.”

I worked in a record shop one Christmas—two years before the post office job. The best defect I got was from someone returning an inconcert album by Marcel Marceau. Each side had thirty minutes of silence, with applause at the end—I kid you not.

I browsed through the Celtic records while I waited for Sam to finish with her customer. I couldn’t afford any of them, but I liked to see what was new. Blasting out of the store’s speakers was the new Beastie Boys album. It sounded like a cross between heavy metal and bad rap and was about as appealing as being hit by a car. You couldn’t deny its energy, though.

By the time Sam was free I’d located five records I would have bought in more flush times. Leaving them in the bin, I drifted over to the front cash just as the Beastie Boys’ last cut ended. Sam replaced them with a tape of New Age piano music.

“What’s the new Oyster Band like?” I asked.

Sam smiled. “It’s terrific. My favorite cut’s ‘The Old Dance.’ It’s sort of an allegory based on Adam and Eve and the serpent that’s got a great hook in the chorus. Telfer’s fiddling just sort of skips ahead, pulling the rest of the song along.”

That’s what I like about alternative record stores like Gypsy’s—the people working in them actually know something about what they’re selling.

“Have you got an open copy?” I asked.

She nodded and turned to the bin of opened records behind her to find it. With her back to me, I couldn’t get lost in those deep blue eyes of hers. I seized my opportunity and plunged ahead.

“Areyouworkingtonight—wouldyouliketogooutwithmesomewhere?”

I’d meant to be cool about it, except the words all blurred together as they left my throat. I could feel the flush start up the back of my neck as she turned and looked back at me with those baby blues.

“Say what?” she asked.

Before my throat closed up on me completely, I tried again, keeping it short. “Do you want to go out with me tonight?”

Standing there with the Oyster Band album in her hand, I thought she’d never looked better.

Especially when she said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

I put in a couple of hours of busking that afternoon, down in Crowsea’s Market, the fiddle humming under my chin to the jingling rhythm of the coins that passersby threw into the case lying open in front of me. I came away with twentysix dollars and change—not the best of days, but enough to buy a halfway decent dinner and a few beers.

I picked up Sam after she finished work and we ate at The Monkey Woman’s Nest, a Mexican restaurant on Williamson just a couple of blocks down from Gypsy’s. I still don’t know how the place got its name. Ernestina Verdad, the Mexican woman who owns the place, looks like a showgirl and not one of her waitresses is even vaguely simian in appearance.

It started to rain as we were finishing our second beer, turning Williamson Street slick with neon reflections. Sam got a funny look on her face as she watched the rain through the window. Then she turned to me.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked.

The serious look in her eyes stopped the halfassed joke that two beers brewed in the carbonated swirl of my mind. I never could hold my alcohol. I wasn’t drunk, but I had a buzz on.

“I don’t think so,” I said carefully. “At least I’ve never seriously stopped to think about it.”

“Come on,” she said, getting up from the table. “I want to show you something.”

I let her lead me out into the rain, though I didn’t let her pay anything towards the meal. Tonight was my treat. Next time I’d be happy to let her do the honors.

“Every time it rains,” she said, “a ghost comes walking down my street ....”

She told me the story as we walked down into Crowsea. The rain was light and I was enjoying it, swinging my fiddle case in my right hand, Sam hanging onto my left as though she’d always walked there.

I felt like I was on top of the world, listening to her talk, feeling the pressure of her arm, the bump of her hip against mine.

She had an apartment on the third floor of an old brick and frame building on Stanton Street. It had a front porch that ran the length of the house, dormer windows—two in the front and back, one on each side—and a sloped mansard roof. We stood on the porch, out of the rain, which was coming down harder now. An orange and white tom was sleeping on the cushion of a white wicker chair by the door.

He twitched a torn ear as we shared his shelter, but didn’t bother to open his eyes. I could smell the mint that was growing up alongside the porch steps, sharp in the wet air.

Sam pointed down the street to where the yellow glare of a streetlamp glistened on the rainslicked cobblestone walk that led to the Hamill estate. The Hamill house itself was separated from the street by a low wall and a dark expanse of lawn, bordered by the spreading boughs of huge oak trees.

“Watch the street,” she said. “Just under the streetlight.”

I looked, but I didn’t see anything. The wind gusted suddenly, driving the rain in hard sheets along Stanton Street, and for a moment we lost all visibility. When it cleared, he was standing there, Sam’s ghost, just like she’d told me. As he started down the street, Sam gave my arm a tug. I stowed my fiddle case under the tom’s wicker chair, and we followed the ghost down Henratty Lane.

By the time he returned to the streetlight in front of the Hamill estate, I was ready to argue that Sam was mistaken. There was nothing in the least bit ghostly about the man we were following. When he returned up Henratty Lane, we had to duck into a doorway to let him pass. He never looked at us, but I could see the rain hitting him. I could hear the sound of his shoes on the pavement. He had to have come out of the walk that led up to the estate’s house, at the same time as that sudden gust of winddriven rain.

It had been a simple coincidence, nothing more. But when he returned to the streetlight, he lifted a hand to wipe his face, and then he was gone. He just winked out of existence. There was no wind. No gust of rain. No place he could have gone. A ghost.

“Jesus,” I said softly as I walked over to the pool of light cast by the streetlamp. There was nothing to see. But there had been a man there. I was sure of that much.

“We’re soaked,” Sam said. “Come on up to my place and I’ll make us some coffee.”

The coffee was great and the company was better. Sam had a small clothes drier in her kitchen. I sat in the living room in an oversized housecoat while my clothes tumbled and turned, the machine creat—

ing a vibration in the floorboards that I’m sure Sam’s downstairs neighbors must have just loved.

Sam had changed into a dark blue sweatsuit—she looked best in blue, I decided—and dried her hair while she was making the coffee. I’d prowled around her living room while she did, admiring her books, her huge record collection, her sound system, and the mantel above a working fireplace that was crammed with knickknacks.

All her furniture was the kind made for comfort—they crouched like sleeping animals about the room. Fat sofa in front of the fireplace, an old pair of matching easy chairs by the window. The bookcases, record cabinet, side tables and trim were all natural wood, polished to a shine with furniture oil.

We talked about a lot of things, sitting on the sofa, drinking our coffees, but mostly we talked about the ghost.

“Have you ever approached him?” I asked at one point.

Sam shook her head. “No. I just watch him walk. I’ve never even talked about him to anybody else.” That made me feel good. “You know, I can’t help but feel that he’s waiting for something, or someone. Isn’t that the way it usually works in ghost stories?”

“This isn’t a ghost story,” I said.

“But we didn’t imagine it, did we? Not both of us at the same time?”

“I don’t know.”

But I knew someone who probably did. Jilly. She was into every sort of strange happening, taking all kinds of odd things seriously. I could remember her telling me that Bramley Dapple—one of her professors at Butler U. and a friend of my brother’s—was really a wizard who had a brownskinned goblin for a valet, but the best thing I remembered about her was her talking about that scene in Disney’s 101 Dalmatians, where the dogs are all howling to send a message across town, one dog sending it out, another picking it up and passing it along, all the way across town and out into the country.

“That’s how they do it,” she’d said. “Just like that.”

And if you walked with her at night and a dog started to howl—if no other dog picked it up, then she’d pass it on. She could mimic any dog’s bark or howl so perfectly it was uncanny. It could also be embarrassing, because she didn’t care who was around or what kinds of looks she got. It was the message that had to be passed on that was important.

When I told Sam about Jilly, she smiled, but there wasn’t any mockery in her smile. Emboldened, I related the ultimatum that Jilly had given me this afternoon.

Sam laughed aloud. “filly sounds like my kind of person,” she said. “I’d like to meet her.”

When it started to get late, I collected my clothes and changed in the bathroom. I didn’t want to start anything, not yet, not this soon, and I knew that Sam felt the same way, though neither of us had spoken of it. She kissed me at the door, a long warm kiss that had me buzzing again.

“Come see me tomorrow?” she asked. “At the store?”

“Just try and keep me away,” I replied.

I gave the old tom on the porch a pat and whistled all the way home to my own place on the other side of Crowsea.

Jilly’s studio was its usual organized mess. It was an open loftlike affair that occupied half of the second floor of a fourstory brown brick building on Yoors Street where Foxville’s low rentals mingle with Crowsea’s shops and older houses. One half of the studio was taken up with a Murphy bed that was never folded back into the wall, a pair of battered sofas, a small kitchenette, storage cabinets and a tiny boxlike bathroom obviously designed with dwarves in mind.

Her easel stood in the other half of the studio, by the window where it could catch the morning sun.

All around it were stacks of sketchbooks, newspapers, unused canvases and art books. Finished canvases leaned face front, five to ten deep, against the back wall. Tubes of paint covered the tops of old wooden orange crates—the new ones lying in neat piles like logs by a fireplace, the used ones in a haphazard scatter, closer to hand. Brushes sat waiting to be used in mason jars. Others were in liquid waiting to be cleaned. Still more, their brushes stiff with dried paint, lay here and there on the floor like discarded pickup-sticks.

The room smelled of oil paint and turpentine. In the corner furthest from the window was a lifesized fabric mache sculpture of an artist at work that bore an uncanny likeness to Jilly herself, complete with Walkman, one paintbrush in hand, another sticking out of its mouth. When I got there that morning, Jilly was at her new canvas, face scrunched up as she concentrated. There was already paint in her hair. On the windowsill behind her a small ghetto blaster was playing a Bach fugue, the piano notes spilling across the room like a light rain. Jilly looked up as I came in, a frown changing liquidly into a smile as she took in the foolish look on my face.

“I should have thought of this weeks ago,” she said. “You look like the cat who finally caught the mouse. Did you have a good time?”

“The best.”

Leaving my fiddle by the door, I moved around behind her so that I could see what she was working on. Sketched out on the white canvas was a Crowsea street scene. I recognized the cornerMcKennitt and Lee. I’d played there from time to time, mostly in the spring. Lately a rockabilly band called the Broken Hearts had taken over the spot.

“Well?” Jilly prompted.

“Well what?”

“Aren’t you going to give me all the lovely sordid details?”

I nodded at the painting. She’d already started to work in the background with oils.

“Are you putting in the Hearts?” I asked.

Jilly jabbed at me with her paint brush, leaving a smudge the color of a Crowsea red brick tenement on my jean jacket.

“I’ll thump you if you don’t spill it all, Geordie, me lad. Just watch if I don’t.”

She was liable to do just that, so I sat down on the ledge behind her and talked while she painted.

We shared a pot of her cowboy coffee, which was what Jilly called the foul brew she made from used coffee grounds. I took two spoons of sugar to my usual one, just to cut back on the bitter taste it left in my throat. Still, beggars couldn’t be choosers. That morning I didn’t even have used coffee grounds at my own place.

“I like ghost stories,” she said when I was finished telling her about my evening. She’d finished roughing out the buildings by now and bent closer to the canvas to start working on some of the finer details before she lost the last of the morning light.

“Was it real?” I asked.

“That depends. Bramley says—”

“I know, I know,” I said, breaking in.

If it wasn’t Ply telling me some weird story about him, it was my brother. What Jilly liked best about him was his theory of consensual reality, the idea that things exist because we agree that they exist.

“But think about it,” Jilly went on. “Sam sees a ghost—maybe because she expects to see one—and you see the same ghost because you care about her, so you’re willing to agree that there’s one there where she says it will be.”

“Say it’s not that, then what could it be?”

“Any number of things. A timeslip—a bit of the past slipping into the present. It could be a restless spirit with unfinished business. From what you say Sam’s told you, though, I’d guess that it’s a case of a timeskip.”

She turned to grin at me, which let me know that the word was one of her own coining. I gave her a dutifully admiring look, then asked, “A what?”

“A timeskip. It’s like a broken record, you know? It just keeps playing the same bit over and over again, only unlike the record it needs something specific to cue it in.”

“Like rain.”

“Exactly.” She gave me a sudden sharp look. “This isn’t for one of your brother’s stories, is it?”

My brother Christy collects odd tales just like Jilly does, only he writes them down. I’ve heard some grand arguments between the two of them comparing the superior qualities of the oral versus written traditions.

“I haven’t seen Christy in weeks,” I said.

“All right, then.”

“So how do you go about handling this sort of thing?” I asked. “Sam thinks he’s waiting for something.”

Jilly nodded. “For someone to lift the tone arm of time.” At the pained look on my face, she added,

“Well, have you got a better analogy?”

I admitted that I didn’t. “But how do you do that? Do you just go over and talk to him, or grab him, or what?”

“Any and all might work. But you have to be careful about that kind of thing.”

“How so?”

“Well,” Jilly said, turning from the canvas to give me a serious look, “sometimes a ghost like that can drag you back to whenever it is that he’s from and you’ll be trapped in his time. Or you might end up taking his place in the timeskip.”

“Lovely.”

“Isn’t it?” She went back to the painting. “What color’s that sign Duffy has over his shop on McKennitt?” she asked.

I closed my eyes, trying to picture it, but all I could see was the face of last night’s ghost, wet with rain.

It didn’t rain again for a couple of weeks. They were good weeks. Sam and I spent the evenings and weekends together. We went out a few times, twice with Jilly, once with a couple of Sam’s friends. Jilly and Sam got along just as well as I’d thought they would—and why shouldn’t they? They were both special people. I should know.

The morning it did rain it was Sam’s day off from Gypsy’s. The previous night was the first I’d stayed over all night. The first we made love. Waking up in the morning with her warm beside me was everything I thought it would be. She was sleepyeyed and smiling, more than willing to nestle deep under the comforter while I saw about getting some coffee together.

When the rain started, we took our mugs into the living room and watched the street in front of the Hamill estate. A woman came by walking one of those fat white bull terriers that look like they’re more pig than dog. The terrier didn’t seem to mind the rain but the woman at the other end of the leash was less than pleased. She alternated between frowning at the clouds and tugging him along. About five minutes after the pair had rounded the corner, our ghost showed up, just winking into existence out of nowhere. Or out of a slip in time. One of Jilly’s timeskips.

We watched him go through his routine. When he reached the streetlight and vanished again, Sam leaned her head against my shoulder. We were cozied up together in one of the big comfy chairs, feet on the windowsill.

“We should do something for him,” she said.

“Remember what Jilly said,” I reminded her.

Sam nodded. “But I don’t think that he’s out to hurt anybody. It’s not like he’s calling out to us or anything. He’s just there, going through the same moves, time after time. The next time it rains ...”

“What’re we going to do?”

Sam shrugged. “Talk to him, maybe?”

I didn’t see how that could cause any harm. Truth to tell, I was feeling sorry for the poor bugger myself.

“Why not?” I said.

About then Sam’s hands got busy and I quickly lost interest in the ghost. I started to get up, but Sam held me down in the chair. “Where are you going?” she asked.

“Well, I thought the bed would be more .

“We’ve never done it in a chair before.”

“There’s a lot of places we haven’t done it yet,” I said.

Those deep blue eyes of hers, about five inches from my own, just about swallowed me.

“We’ve got all the time in the world,” she said.

It’s funny how you remember things like that later.

The next time it rained, Jilly was with us. The three of us were walking home from Your Second Home, a sleazy bar on the other side of Foxville where the band of a friend of Sam’s was playing. None of us looked quite right for the bar when we walked in. Sam was still the perennial California beach girl, all blonde and curves in a pair of tight jeans and a white Tshirt, with a faded jeanjacket overtop. Jilly and I looked like the scruffs we were.

The bar was a place for serious drinking during the day, serving mostly unemployed bluecollar workers spending their welfare checks on a few hours of forgetfulness. By the time the band started around nine, though, the clientele underwent a drastic transformation. Scattered here and there through the crowd was the odd individual who still dressed for volume—all the colors turned up loud—but mostly we were outnumbered thirtyto-one by spikehaired punks in their black leathers and blue jeans.

It was like being on the inside of a bruise.

The band was called the Wang Boys and ended up being pretty good—especially on their original numbers—if a bit loud. My ears were ringing when we finally left the place sometime after midnight. We were having a good time on the walk home. Jilly was in rare form, halfdancing on the street around us, singing the band’s closing number, making up the words, turning the piece into a punk gospel number.

She kept bouncing around in front of us, skipping backwards as she tried to get us to sing along.

The rain started as a thin drizzle as were making our way through Crowsea’s narrow streets. Sam’s fingers tightened on my arm and Jilly stopped fooling around as we stepped into Henratty Lane, the rain coming down in earnest now. The ghost was just turning in the far end of the lane.

“Geordie,” Sam said, her fingers tightening more.

I nodded. We brushed by Jilly and stepped up our pace, aiming to connect with the ghost before he made his turn and started back towards Stanton Street.

“This is not a good idea,” Jilly warned us, hurrying to catch up. But by then it was too late.

We were right in front of the ghost. I could tell he didn’t see Sam or me and I wanted to get out of his way before he walked right through us—I didn’t relish the thought of having a ghost or a timeskip or whatever he was going through me. But Sam wouldn’t move. She put out her hand, and as her fingers brushed the wet tweed of his jacket, everything changed.

The sense of vertigo was strong. Henratty Lane blurred. I had the feeling of time flipping by like the pages of a calendar in an old movie, except each page was a year, not a day. The sounds of the city around us—sounds we weren’t normally aware of—were noticeable by their sudden absence. The ghost jumped at Sam’s touch. There was a bewildered look in his eyes and he backed away. That sensation of vertigo and blurring returned until Sam caught him by the arm and everything settled down again. Quiet, except for the rain and a faroff voice that seemed to be calling my name.

“Don’t be frightened,” Sam said, keeping her grip on the ghost’s arm. “We want to help you.”

“You should not be here,” he replied. His voice was stiff and a little formal. “You were only a dream—nothing more. Dreams are to be savoured and remembered, not walking the streets.”

Underlying their voices I could still hear the faint sound of my own name being called. I tried to ignore it, concentrating on the ghost and our surroundings. The lane was clearer than I remembered it—no trash littered against the walls, no graffiti scrawled across the bricks. It seemed darker, too. It was almost possible to believe that we’d been pulled back into the past by the touch of the ghost.

I started to get nervous then, remembering what Jilly had told us. Into the past. What if we were in the past and we couldn’t get out again? What if we got trapped in the same timeskip as the ghost and were doomed to follow his routine each time it rained?

Sam and the ghost were still talking but I could hardly hear what they were saying. I was thinking of Jilly. We’d brushed by her to reach the ghost, but she’d been right behind us. Yet when I looked back, there was no one there. I remembered that sound of my name, calling faintly across some great distance.

I listened now, but heard only a vague unrecognizable sound. It took me long moments to realize that it was a dog barking.

I turned to Sam, tried to concentrate on what she was saying to the ghost. She was starting to pull away from him, but now it was his hand that held her arm. As I reached forward to pull her loose, the barking suddenly grew in volume—not one dog’s voice, but those of hundreds, echoing across the years that separated us from our own time. Each year caught and sent on its own dog’s voice, the sound building into a cacophonous chorus of yelps and barks and howls.

The ghost gave Sam’s arm a sharp tug and I lost my grip on her, stumbling as the vertigo hit me again. I fell through the sound of all those barking dogs, through the blurring years, until I dropped to my knees on the wet cobblestones, my hands reaching for Sam. But Sam wasn’t there.

“Geordie?”

It was Jilly, kneeling by my side, hand on my shoulder. She took my chin and turned my face to hers, but I pulled free.

“Sam!” I cried.

A gust of wind drove rain into my face, blinding me, but not before I saw that the lane was truly empty except for Jilly and me. Jilly, who’d mimicked the barking of dogs to draw us back through time.

But only I’d returned. Sam and the ghost were both gone.

“Oh, Geordie,” Jilly murmured as she held me close. “I’m so sorry.

* * *

I don’t know if the ghost was ever seen again, but I saw Sam one more time after that night. I was with Jilly in Moore’s Antiques in Lower Crowsea, flipping through a stack of old sepiatoned photographs, when a group shot of a family on their front porch stopped me cold. There, among the somber faces, was Sam. She looked different. Her hair was drawn back in a tight bun and she wore a plain unbecoming dark dress, but it was Sam all right. I turned the photograph over and read the photographer’s date on the back. 1912.

Something of what I was feeling must have shown on my face, for Jilly came over from a basket of old earrings that she was looking through.

“What’s the matter, Geordie, me lad?” she asked.

Then she saw the photograph in my hand. She had no trouble recognizing Sam either. I didn’t have any money that day, but Jilly bought the picture and gave it to me. I keep it in my fiddle case.

I grow older each year, building up a lifetime of memories, only I’ve no Sam to share them with. But often when it rains, I go down to Stanton Street and stand under the streetlight in front of the old Hamill estate. One day I know she’ll be waiting there for me.