“Oh, but you must. Clarity awaits, Miranda!” He said it with the exaggerated voice of a bad actor making a thunderous exit.

I didn’t move. His expression slid from big smile to not happy.

“It was my baby, wasn’t it?”

“Yes. Come along now and you can see her in the next room. She’s there.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You can believe him.” Hugh appeared in the door holding the baby in his arms. She was chuckling and hitting his nose with a tiny open hand. “Miranda, you have to do this. There’s no other way.”

I stretched out both hands to him. Hugh. With our baby.

He smiled. “It’s all right, Miranda. Shumda’s telling the truth—go with him and it’ll help you understand everything.” Before he turned and left, his eyes fell on the cradle. They moved to the piece of wood that had broken off. It lay near my foot. He looked at me and I knew he was saying something important.

“All right.”

The three of them left. I picked up the wood and slipped it into my pocket. I walked out of the room and across the cellar. The only sound was my shuffling footsteps. The air smelled heavily of dirt and damp. My face was very hot. I could smell my own sweat.

The door to the other room was closed. I grabbed the knob and tried to pull the door open. It was very difficult to move and scraped loudly across the uneven floor. When it was half-open I stopped to take a slow deep breath. I wasn’t ready for this but it had to be done. My heart did a few strange misbeats in my chest. I pulled again, hard, and the door came fully open.

What I expected was another room the same size as the last. That’s all. No real idea of what would be in there, but definitely not what was there.

A ramp—a wide gray concrete ramp leading upward to lights. Brilliant lights against a black night sky illuminated something I couldn’t see yet but which appeared to be… a stadium? A playing field? Giant banks of lights at fixed intervals shone down on what I could only guess was a field. I walked through the basement door and onto the ramp.

Stopping there, I looked left and right. It was a stadium. Walkways went off to either side and connected to other ramps. I had been to football games in college and later to Yankee Stadium with a boyfriend who was crazy for baseball. This was a very big stadium. I had walked through a door in the basement of my house in Crane’s View into the bowels of a colossal sports stadium.

There were no other people around, which made things even more ominous and disturbing. Thirty feet away I saw a brightly lit concession stand, but no one was there—no salespeople or customers.

“Hello?”

Nothing.

What was I supposed to do? I walked farther up the ramp to see what this was about. Hugh said I should do this. Shumda said I could see our baby if I entered this place.

My heart kept misfiring in my chest. I put a hand over it. Okay, it’s okay. After a few steps I stopped, and looked over my shoulder to see if the basement door was still behind me. It was. I could go back. I hesitated. But nothing was there; everything was in front of me. I walked up the ramp, into the stadium.

My footsteps echoed around me until I was almost at the top of the ramp. Then the noise inside the stadium rose up like a wave. You know it because you’ve heard it before: at a baseball game or rock concert when you return to your seat after buying a hot dog or going to the bathroom. That big noise is there but it’s in the background for the moment. Your own steps are louder till you reach the top of the ramp and walk in. Next twenty thousand people and their life-sounds envelop you in a second. Talk, movement, laughter, shuffling, whistles—all together in one mighty hullabaloo.

The stadium was packed with people. I stood at the entrance and paused to soak up the picture. Thousands of people. Every seat appeared filled. In that first glimpse I did not look at anyone carefully because I was taking in the whole picture. I was surprised to see nothing laid out down on the field, no football goalposts at either end of a marked field, ten-yard line, end zone. No baseball diamond with home plate and perfect white lines marking the base paths. The field was a manicured lawn with nothing but the greenest grass glowing even greener beneath the blazing arc lights. I heard snatches of conversation and laughter, feet scraping across the stone floors, clapping. Someone far away hooted. More. So much more. The human rumble of tens of thousands of people in an enclosed place.

Hugh stood out on the field holding our baby. There was no one else out there but the two of them. They looked so small in all of that green space. He was staring at me but made no gesture for me to join him. I gave a little wave. He made the baby’s arm wave back. What was I supposed to do? Why were we all here? Who were these people? What was this stadium?

As these thoughts tumbled around in my head, the noise dwindled, decreased slowly, wound down to almost nothing. It was almost quiet. That’s when I looked around to see how others were responding to the new eerie quiet. And something else. Cologne. The scent of an exquisite and very familiar men’s cologne made me search for its source. Diptyque. I even remembered the name.

Looking to the left, I was shocked twice. Because everyone was watching me. And because I saw my old friend Clayton Blanchard, the man who had introduced me to both bookselling and Frances Hatch. It was his cologne I had smelled. Sitting no more than three feet away, he was dressed beautifully, as usual—perfectly pressed dark suit, multicolored silk ascot, white shirt. I mouthed his name and a silent question: Clayton? Here? He smiled.

Next to him sat a boy I didn’t recognize at first. But all at once I did. Like a swimmer struggling up from deep water, my memory rose to the surface, slowly but when it broke through I knew him. Ludger Pooth. That was his ridiculous name. His family lived next door to mine on Mariahilferstrasse in Vienna in 1922. He and his friend Kuno Sandholzer once lured me to the attic of our building and made me pull down my underpants. They thought they were making me do something terrible, but I didn’t mind. Just so long as they paid attention to me. Ludger wore a brown tweed golf cap that he kept tugging on. I remembered the gesture very well.

Next to him was another person I didn’t initially recognize, but his name too quickly came to me: Viktor Petluchen, the first man Lolly Adcock ever slept with. Scanning the hundreds, the thousands of faces watching at me, I soon recognized everyone I saw. Names. More and more of their names came to me and with them the stories that went with the names.

In my past lives I had known every one of these people. I began to remember those lives, these faces. How we met and parted, what they had meant to me. All of them were in this stadium.

How many people do we meet in a lifetime? How many have an impact on us, and vice versa? Imagine being surrounded at one moment by every person you have ever known—some for an instant, some your whole life. All of them are watching you because the only thing that links them together is you. You are their thread.

Now imagine there is reincarnation. Imagine all the people of all your lives, together…

It grew even quieter. There was noise, a quick cough, a shoe scraping across the floor, hurried whispers. We were all waiting for what came next. I could not stop looking around because each new face brought back another memory.

These people wore the clothes of their time, so there was an incredible array of dress and looks. Men were decked out in worker’s overalls, in rough linen, rags, and double-breasted suits from Huntsman of Savile Row. Thick mustaches or shaved heads, fur hats, astrakhans, baseball caps, sandals, wooden clogs, spats, leather boots up to the knees. They carried guns at their sides, briefcases. Women wore high powdered wigs, bonnets, dirndls, floor-length robes, a pink Chanel suit, a T-shirt advertising the rap group Black-Eyed Peas. People’s names I had said hundreds of times sometimes hundreds of years before came back like forgotten facts: Viktor Petluchen, Henry Allison, Jasna and Flenda Sukalo. Elzbieta Dudzinska. My friend Dessie Kimbrough, the English ambassador’s daughter, who fell from the Reichsbrucke and drowned in the Danube on New Year’s Day, 1918. 1949, 1971, 1827, 1799… Each of my lives, all of my years, all the living and the dead people I had ever known, together in that stadium. The thousands and thousands.