Jenny Plague-Bringer(5)

Here, many of the large sculptures were abstract, depicting ideas and emotions rather than trying to look like copies of objects in the real world. Some of them were low, dark masses of granite, reminding her of the enormous graveyard behind Seth’s house in Fallen Oak. Others looked like colorful totem poles or twisted metals reaching toward the sky. In the galleries of Paris, Jenny had seen sculptures that included all kinds of materials and found objects, and sometimes unusual lighting arrangements or glowing images and words cast from a projector or television screen, multidimensional art.

Jenny was getting ideas for new kinds of sculptures, things that would express the love, guilt, and horror inside her.

Seth sidled up next to Jenny and took her silk-gloved hand nervously. It was an odd move for him. They’d been intimate too long for him to be so uncomfortable approaching her.

“Look,” he whispered.

Jenny followed his eyes to a tiered, sunken semicircle of concrete right on the river, which offered three levels of seating. Teenagers were using it to practice leaps with their skateboards. Two of them, a boy and girl, sat apart from the others, much more interested in kissing than in streets sports.

“How old do you bet they are?” Seth whispered.

“Sixteen, seventeen.” Jenny shrugged. “Just kids.”

“We were kids like that, a long time ago.”

“Now we’ve reached the ancient age of twenty,” Jenny said. “Better make our reservations at the nursing home.”

“I was thinking...” He squeezed her hand tight, which worried her a little. “Maybe we should get married, Jenny.”

His unexpected words were like an electric shock to her heart. She looked at him in surprise, but finally she laughed. “Seth! We can’t get married.”

“Why not?”

“For one, people who are officially dead don’t usually have weddings,” Jenny pointed out.

“That could be our theme. A zombie wedding, Day of the Dead stuff everywhere...”

“Now you sound like Alexander.” Jenny heard herself say it, but immediately regretted it. Seth’s face hardened.

“Don’t ever say that.”

“I just meant, that was his decorating scheme...”

“Don’t ever say ‘Alexander’ to me.”

“What if I’m talking about Alexander the Great? Or Alexandre Dumas?” Jenny tried a smile to lighten things up.

“I ask you to marry me and you immediately mention him? You don’t want to get married?”

“We can’t, Seth. I mean, if we did that, we might as well send an invitation to the Department of Homeland Security.”

“I’m not stupid, I know we couldn’t tell anyone. It wouldn’t be that kind of wedding.”

“What kind would it be? Our fake identities getting married?” Jenny’s passport claimed she was from Alsace. Since nobody believed Seth could pass as French, he carried a Canadian passport instead.

“I just think we should,” Seth said. “I wasn’t thinking about paperwork or anything.”

“It’s sweet of you, Seth. The bond we have is so much more than marriage, though, isn’t it? Lifetime after lifetime, we can be together. Even death won’t do us part. We don’t need some piece of paper from other people acknowledging that.”

“I’m not thinking about ‘lifetime after lifetime,’” Seth replied. “I don’t have all these tons of crazy past-life memories like you. For me, it’s just this life and who we are today.”

“That’s all that matters, Seth.” She embraced him, resting her cheek against his warm chest and looking up at him. “But we can’t have that normal life, with marriage. Or children.”

“Children? Why not?”

Jenny felt like she’d been slapped. She couldn’t believe he was even asking. He didn’t have all the past-life memories she did, but this one should have been obvious. She felt herself crumple as she answered the question.

“Because I can’t. The pox. The baby will miscarry, or it will die on the way out...just like I killed my own mother, on the way out. The babies are never immune.” In her mind, a collection of extremely painful past-life memories sprung up, and she shoved them back. She felt heartsick. “Seth, you’re lucky you don’t remember much before this lifetime.”

“I’m sorry, Jenny,” he said, looking into her eyes. “I should have known. I really haven’t thought about kids one way or the other, so—”

“There’s only one way to think about them. We can’t, ever.”

Seth took this in, looking out at the river again. Jenny could see a mix of disappointment and confusion on his face.