She nods.
“I’m going to prove it to you,” I tell her. “I’m going to show you what it really means.”
“What?”
“Love.”
Is she scared by this? Embarrassed? Hopeful?
I don’t know. I’m not close enough to tell.
Tom gives me no small amount of grief when I get home—partly because I went to Starbucks, and partly because I then had to walk two miles to get back home, and was late for dinner, which our father roundly chewed me out over.
“I hope whoever she was, she was worth it,” Tom taunts.
I look at him blankly.
“Dude, don’t try to tell me you were just going for the coffee or the folk tunes they play on the speakers. I know you better than that.”
I remain silent.
I am assigned to wash all the dishes. While doing so, I turn on the radio, and when the local news comes on, Nathan Daldry comes with it.
“So tell us, Nathan, what you experienced last Saturday,” the interviewer says.
“I was possessed. There’s no other word for it. I wasn’t in control of my own body. I consider myself lucky to be alive. And I want to ask anyone else who’s ever been possessed like this, just for a day, to contact me. Because, I’ll be honest with you, Chuck, a lot of people think I’m crazy. Other kids at school are making fun of me constantly. But I know what happened. And I know I’m not the only one.”
I know I’m not the only one.
This is the sentence that haunts me. I wish I felt the same certainty.
I wish I weren’t the only one.
Day 6004
The next morning I wake up in the same room.
In the same body.
I can’t believe it. I don’t understand. After all these years.
I look at the wall. My hands. The sheets.
And then I look to my side and see James sleeping there in his bed.
James.
And I realize: I’m not in the same body. I’m not on the same side of the room.
No, this morning I’m his twin, Tom.
I have never had this chance before. I watch as James emerges from sleep, emerges from a day away from his old body. I am looking for the traces of that oblivion, the bafflement of that waking. But what I get is the familiar scene of a football player stretching himself into the day. If he feels at all strange, at all different, he’s not showing it.
“Dude, what are you staring at?”
This doesn’t come from James, but from our other brother, Paul.
“Just getting up,” I mumble.