Jenny sat beside him on the bed, laid the old water-stained album cover on her lap, and crumbled the bud of weed she'd liberated from the cigar box in her dad's room. This was probably part of the harvest from the patch he grew out on neglected, bank-owned land outside of town. The money mostly went to cover the property taxes on the Morton family land. He broke the government's law in order to pay the government's bill.
“I thought you said you were quitting the drugs,” Seth said.
“Yeah, I'm never touching coke again. That stuff makes you into a real asshole.”
“It sure does.” Seth brushed her hair from her face and kissed her. “I'm glad you came back.”
“I'm glad you came swooping in to take me,” Jenny said. “My hero. How sexy of you.”
“I think it was very sexy, personally.” Seth kissed her. “You're so lucky to have me.”
“And you're so unlucky that my last boyfriend wants you dead. He's a gangster, you know.”
“You're a dangerous girl.”
“Obviously.” Jenny licked and twisted the joint in her fingers. “Rocky, want to go for a walk?”
Rocky, who had by all appearances been deep in a coma under the window, jumped to all four feet and scampered to the door, tail wagging.
Jenny and Seth walked along the trail into the hilly woods behind her house. They reached the heap of boulders where they had spent lazy afternoons and a few very hot evenings together, but Jenny led him on past the big rock.
“Where are we going?” Seth asked.
“Further.”
She led him up and over a steep ridge and through a stand of old, coiled oak trees to a small patch of sunlit meadow, full of fall wildflowers, purple asters, goldenrods in bloom.
“Here.” Jenny took his hand and led him a little pyramid of creek-smoothed stones at the center of the meadow. “This is where my dad buried my mom.”
“Oh.” Seth gazed at the stone cairn. “I didn't know she was here.”
“Officially, she's still 'missing,'” Jenny said. “My dad hid her body so they wouldn't identify her cause of death. Which was me. It's my fault she died. I ruined their lives, my mom and dad. They used to be happy people.”
“It's not your fault.”
“It is. I've started figuring out a way I can avoid killing my...killing my mothers, when I'm born. It happened by accident the first time. If I'm born in a caul, that will protect them.”
“What's a caul?”
“It's a membrane from inside the womb. The amniotic sac, is what it's called. Some bodies are born wrapped in it. Looks like a shroud of skin.”
“That sounds creepy.”
“Most people think it's something sacred.”
“But you can't control that, can you?” Seth asked.
“If I'm careful enough, and enter the fetus early enough, and I really concentrate...I think I can. I messed it up last time, but I've done it a couple times before. I was in too much of a rush, and we'd been searching for Ashleigh between incarnations, because she was hiding from us—I don't think I moved into this body early enough to influence the womb like that.” She looked at mother's grave. “I promise I'll never make that mistake again, Momma.”
“Moving into the body?” Seth asked. “Is that what we do? Find some developing baby in the womb and...what? Possess it like a ghost? Are we taking over lives that were supposed to be lived by someone else?”
“From what I can remember, the regular human souls can move in anytime during pregnancy, up until right before the birth. So we just have to find an empty vessel nobody's claimed yet. It's like parking at the mall. You hope for a good spot, but you take what you can get.”
“Where do all the human souls come from, anyway?” Seth asked. “Do you remember that?”
“I'm not sure I ever knew that.” Jenny knelt by the cairn of stones, straightening a few that had slipped loose. “But, I think I'm kind of jealous of them. Maybe they reincarnate for a while. But ultimately they come from somewhere, they move on to somewhere. Not us. We're just stuck here, over and over again. I don't know if we ever get to move on.”
“I don't mind being stuck here, as long we can live our lives together. Think of everything we might see, in all those lifetimes to come.” Seth knelt beside her, rubbing her back. “I'm sorry about your mom, Jenny.”
“I know.” She leaned her head on his shoulder. “You lost your brother. That must have been rough.”
“Yeah.”
“I can almost see why people like Ashleigh and Alexander resist getting too human,” Jenny said. “It can hurt so much. There's a lot of suffering involved once you start to care about people. Love makes you vulnerable to the worst kinds of pain.”