His words settled deeply into the atoms of the room. Janice licked her lips, which had suddenly become parched. Bill cleared his throat.
“Isn’t that a little unusual,” he ventured, “a person coming back so quickly? I mean, I always heard it took … uh … a long time to come back. I mean, people who believe in it, always speak of having lived during the time of Caesar and Davy Crockett, you know? Isn’t it unusual for someone to die one second”—Bill snapped his fingers—“and be born the next second? I mean, you tell me—”
“In my experience, Mr. Templeton, I have found that those who die an early or violent death and are interrupted from experiencing the full opportunities of their mental, physical, and spiritual growth often return sooner than those who die in peace at a ripe old age. Oftentimes a soul may return at the instant of death. In Tibet each Dalai Lama is the immediate incarnation of his predecessor. When a Dalai Lama dies, Tibetan notables immediately begin a search for the new incarnation.”
“And they always find him?”
“For five centuries they have never failed.”
“How do they do it?”
“By interpreting certain portents. After the thirteenth Dalai Lama died, they placed his body on a throne, facing south. After several days, they found that his face had turned to the east, where curious cloud formations were also seen in the vicinity of Lhasa. High lamas and notables went to all parts of Lhasa in search of the newly born Dalai Lama.”
“And they found him?”
“Yes. In the village of Taktser, they found a boy of two, living in humble surroundings. When the leader of the party, Lama Kewtsang Rinpoche, entered the house, the little boy went to him immediately and sat on his lap. Around the lama’s neck was a rosary which had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. When the child saw it, he recognized it and wanted it. The lama promised to give it to him if he could guess who he was, and the boy said, Sera-aga, which means, ‘A lama of Sera.’”
Bill coughed.
“Okay, so you found your girl. Why the disguise? Why all that Secret Service stuff, following us around, scaring the hell out of us?”
“I apologize for that,” Hoover replied with a look of regret. “But I had to be sure you were the right people. That Ivy was the right child. The times of death and birth, although pretty remarkable, were still not convincing proof. It might still have been only a coincidence.…”
“And your research convinced you that we were the right people?”
“Try to understand, Mr. Templeton. In the Buddhist belief, death becomes a mere incident in life, a change of scene, a brief journey in which the soul wanders in search of a new life, selecting the parents to whom it wishes to be born. Audrey Rose would naturally have sought out a life and parents similar to those she knew and loved in her previous life. It was no accident that she chose you. The kind of people you are, the depth of love and understanding, the quality of intellect, the way of life you offered made you the perfect family in which to be reborn.”
“What if Audrey Rose hadn’t died?” Bill interjected. “What would our daughter have become, an empty shell?”
“She would have become the receptor of another soul.”
Bill shook his head. “You would think, if that were the case, that she’d remember some of her past lives.”
“Such remembrance would only complicate her present life, Mr. Templeton. Hindus consider it tragic if a child remembers a former existence, for this, they believe, signifies an early death.”
Bill heaved a deep sigh, as if catching his second wind.
“Okay,” he continued, his mind ferreting among the questions still left to be asked, seeking the proper, logical successor to the last. “So you came to New York, and using a disguise, started observing our family.…”
“No, not immediately. As I said, there were others, but for one reason or another they didn’t fit. I started observing your daughter a little over a month ago, and almost at once I began to see little things in Ivy that did indeed remind me of Audrey Rose.…”
“Like what?”
“The way she walks, for example. Her tendency to get lost in a daydream whenever she walks. The funny habit of licking her lips just before she starts to speak. Her sudden laugh; the way she throws back her head when she laughs; the gentle sadness in her eyes when something painful occurs—like that day, Mrs. Templeton, when you both stopped to help that injured pigeon.…”
Janice felt her soul turn white as he went on to describe the myriad, lovely, subtle gestures and qualities that were Ivy’s exclusive property—those rare, tenuous nuances of movement, style, and nature that Janice thought she herself had only been aware of. She was suddenly thankful that Ivy was not around, that she was safely tucked away with Carole downstairs, beyond the proximity of Elliot Hoover’s strange and terrible insight.
“All these things, these little idiosyncrasies were Audrey Rose’s, Mr. Templeton. In so many ways, the two of them are one and the same person.”
“Do they also resemble each other?”
“No. It is only the spirit which passes from life to life; the physical you is new with each birth. Here”—Hoover reached into his pocket and removed his wallet; he carefully extracted a small photograph from its Plasticine container and handed it to Bill—“a picture of Audrey Rose, taken about a month before she passed on.”
Bill studied the picture. The face he saw staring back at him was round, flat-featured, and plain. Her hair was straight, light brown, and resembled her father’s, as did her eyes. Bill passed the photograph to Janice, who glanced at it briefly and quickly thrust it back at Bill as if it were something diseased and contagious. Bill offered the photograph back to Hoover, who gingerly reinserted it into its protective covering.
“Well, Mr. Hoover,” Bill said, flashing his best smile, “we seem to have come to the point where I’m supposed to ask you what it is exactly that you want from us?”
Hoover smiled back. “Nothing more or less than you and your wife are prepared to give me.”
“Well, like what?” Bill urged. “You tell us.”
Hoover’s eyes became distant, serene. “This chance to see Ivy occasionally, to watch her grow, to be of help, if needed.…”
“That might be difficult to arrange.”
“Not if I became your friend. Your neighbor. I intend to settle in New York and take up my professional life once again.” Hoover saw the stiff lines of resistance on their faces and quickly added, “Understand, I’ll make no demands on your time or expect any special privileges or considerations.…”
Yeah, sure, Bill thought hotly, in a pig’s ass you won’t.
“And, of course, Ivy would never know about our … relationship. As I said before, it would be dangerous for her to know.…”
Bill held up his hand. “Okay, I have a question. Since, by your own admission, your presence does present a danger to Ivy, and since you say you care about what happens to her and that you wish to be of help to her, why don’t you just step out of the picture? That would be the greatest help you could give her, as I see it. Right now, our daughter is a normal, healthy child. Aren’t you interested in seeing that she stay that way? I mean, say that there is a little bit of your child mixed up in her somehow, why take a chance on destroying them both?”
The question was a good one, direct, simply expressed, to the point, and Janice was proud of Bill for having thought of it. There was no way Hoover could answer without betraying his own selfish interest. She watched Hoover press the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger and knew that behind the bland gesture was a mind that was racing.