Mr. Hitchcock chose neither to dematerialize like an ordinary spirit nor to float swiftly ahead of me, feet off the ground. He walked at my side, one hand on my shoulder.
“When I was alive in the material sense,” he said, “I had many faults, as everyone does. At times I could be something of a glutton as regards both food and drink.”
I had no idea where this was leading.
“I remember once at the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall, in London, I had much too much to drink and everything suddenly seemed to be receding from me—people, walls, everything. I’m afraid I embarrassed dear Alma.”
“Sir, it’s hard to imagine you reeling around, out of control.” As a director he was known as a perfectionist and a control freak.
“Oh, I didn’t embarrass my patient wife in that way. I simply clammed up and found it impossible to engage in conversation, which made me appear to be bored and rude.”
We walked a few steps in silence.
He said, “I was raised by Jesuits, you know. They were fierce disciplinarians. I lived in horror of the Prior and his punishments, so much so that, as a boy, I developed a morbid revulsion from any behavior that might be considered bad. I came to fear my own capacity for evil and error, which developed into a dread of authority that was almost phobic.”
Perhaps it was best that I not ask what capacity for evil the director of Psycho had worried about in himself. But then it turned out to be less than I might have imagined.
“As an adult, I loved to drive, to be behind the wheel with open road ahead. But I so dreaded being stopped by a traffic cop—dreaded it like death, Mr. Thomas—that I hardly ever drove. I left all the driving to Alma or hired drivers even before I could afford to hire them. Always questioning your motivations is a healthy thing, but fearing your capacity for doing the wrong thing, so that you retreat from many aspects of life, is a terrible error in itself.”
If I’d had a father capable of wisdom and interested in passing it along to a son, this might have been what it would have felt like.
I said, “My girl, Stormy Llewellyn, she was the best person I’ve ever known. She was amazing, sir. She believed that this life is not the first of two but the first of three.”
“Quite the philosopher for a young lady who worked in an ice-cream shop,” he said sincerely, not with a wry edge.
After the scene that I had just witnessed, nothing more could surprise me that night.
I said, “Stormy called this life boot camp. She said we have to persevere through all this world’s obstacles and all the wounds that it inflicts if we want to earn a second life. We’re in training, see. After boot camp, there’s what she called service. Our life of service will be full of tremendous adventure, as if you had rolled all the adventure novels ever written into one.”
“And the third life, Mr. Thomas?”
“She thought that after we finish service, then we receive our eternal life.”
I stopped, withdrew my wallet from a hip pocket, and opened it to the plastic window in which I kept the card. I could read it in the moonlight. In fact, I could have read it in the dark: YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.
“We got it from a fortune-telling machine in an arcade at a carnival when we were just sixteen.”
“Gypsy Mummy,” he said, naming the machine. “Quite a colorful device. I might have used it in a movie if I’d made a few more.”
I looked up from the card and met his stare. The kindness in his eyes reminded me of my closest friends in Pico Mundo.
An owl hooted nearby, and a more distant owl responded. Two ordinary owls in an ordinary night.
“I believe this card, sir. I trust it totally. I’m sure it’s the truest thing I’ve ever known.”
He smiled and nodded.
“What do you think, sir? I’d really like to know. What do you think about the card?”
“You’re not ready to leave this world yet, Mr. Thomas.”
“I don’t think it’ll be much longer. It’s all coming around to how it started in Pico Mundo nineteen months ago.”
“What must be will be.”
I smiled. “You sound like Annamaria now.”
“And why wouldn’t I?” he asked, which gave me something to think about.
Putting away my wallet, I said, “Boot camp. Sometimes, sir, the training seems unnecessarily hard.”
“In retrospect, it won’t,” he assured me.
Mr. Hitchcock walked with me all the way to the car. He pointed not to the front door on the starboard side but to the door behind it, which served the long passenger compartment, and the power window purred down.
I leaned into the window and saw the children crammed into the back of the limousine, a couple of them sitting on the floor. None of them appeared to be uncomfortable. They looked tired but awake, wide awake.