She continued to ignore me.

“Hello? Excuse me?”

“Yes?”

“I would like to see Frances Hatch.”

“What room is she in?”

“I don’t remember.”

The woman sighed mightily and consulted her computer. She said the room number and immediately went back to her book.

“That’s a nice line.”

She looked up. “What?”

“’Bend your back to it, sir: for it will snow all night.’ It’s a nice line. It pretty much says it all.”

She looked at me, her book, me. She snapped it shut and grew a suspicious look. I walked away.

The elevator arrived with a ping and the doors opened on Frances’s doctor. “You’re back.”

“Yes. I have to talk to Frances. But first I have a question: Could you tell me, what exactly is this place? Who is it for?”

“It’s a hospice. Of sorts.”

“People come here to die? Frances is going to die?”

“Yes. She’s very weak.”

“But why here? She loves her apartment so much. Why would she come here?”

“Do you mind if I go up with you? Just up to her floor? Then I’ll leave you alone.”

“All right.” I stepped into the elevator. She pressed the button.

When the door closed, she turned to me and asked in a low voice, “Do you know about your lives?”

“Yes.”

“Would you tell me how you learned?”

I briefly described returning to the house in Crane’s View, the fire, the stadium, and the word Declan had used there that explained everything. I said nothing about Hugh’s and my baby. While I spoke, she crossed her arms and lowered her head almost to her chest. When I finished we were standing near Frances’s door.

The doctor slowly shook her head. “Extraordinary. It’s always different.”

“This is common?”

“Miranda, everyone here has experienced the same thing as you. It simply manifests itself differently every time. All of your lives have led you here. Now you must make a great decision. You can stay here as long as you like and you’ll be safe. That’s one of our purposes—to protect you while you decide. The other function is to care for those who have made the decision and choose to end their lives here.

“Hospices for people like you have existed for as long as recorded history. A hotel in the Pyrenees, a youth hostel in Mali, a hospital in Montevideo. There is an inscription over one of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt—”

“What decision are you talking about?”

“Frances will tell you, but I think you already know. All of those people in the stadium hated you because you took something essential from the life of every one of them. People use the word vampire because it is something so foreign, so impossible to imagine really existing that we shiver at the thought and then laugh it off as idiotic fantasy. Dracula? Sucking blood and sleeping in a coffin? Silly. But if you look up the definition it says ‘one who preys on others.’ Everyone does that, but we have nice rational explanations for it. Until you look more closely.

“I think you must talk to Frances now. She’ll answer the questions you have.” She turned to leave. I touched her arm.

“Wait! But who are you?”

“Someone like you. I was in the same situation as you are but made my decision a long time ago.” She touched my hand. “At least you’ll have clarity now. I learned how important that is, no matter where it leaves you in the end.” She walked soundlessly down the hall and out the door at the other end. The same door Hugh’s son had used earlier. Today. All this had happened in one day.

I knocked softly on Frances’s door and pushed it open. The first thing that hit me was the perfume. An aroma like the most wonderful flower shop. I hesitated in pushing the door further. The flood of colors and shapes drowned the eyes. For a second I couldn’t even find the bed. When I did I had to smile because Frances was sitting up straight reading a magazine, looking totally oblivious to the paradise surrounding her.

Then I heard music. It was classical, lilting and summery, something I had never heard before. It reminded me of Saint-Saens’s “Aquarium.” Before speaking, I let my eyes and ears calm down.

Still flicking through her magazine and without lifting her eyes, Frances said, “Close the door, girl. I don’t want people seeing me in this nightgown.”

“The room is so beautiful, Frances. You always know how to do up a place.”

“Thank you. Come in and sit down. There’s a chair in here somewhere. Just shift some flowers.”

“Who sent them to you?”

“The Shits. But we have other things to talk about. I assume that’s why you’re here in the middle of the night?”

“Yes. But could you turn off the music while we talk?”

She stared at me blankly, as if I had said something complicated in a foreign language. “The music! No, I can’t do that. It’s piped in. There’s no control.”

“What if you don’t want to hear it?”

She started to say something but stopped. “You grow used to it. Forget the music, Miranda. Tell me what happened to you. And give the details—they’re very important.”

I told her everything, including seeing Hugh and our child. It didn’t take long. It was disturbing to finish as quickly as I did. In the end, each of us has only one story to tell. It takes a lifetime to live that story but sometimes less than an hour to tell it.

The only time Frances showed real emotion was when I told her about Shumda. She grilled me on what he looked like, what he said, how he acted. Normally very pale, her face grew redder as I talked. Eventually she put a hand over her mouth and kept it there until I finished describing the last thing he said to me before walking off the porch. She stared at the window and seemed to be putting both her thoughts and her emotions together.

“Your name in Vienna was Elisabeth Lanz. Your death was the most celebrated scandal of the day because so many people were in the theater when you fell. Shumda was a great star then. People came from all over Europe to see him. The chief of police was in the audience that night and personally arrested him.

“The Landesgericht. Shumda used to like to say that word to me when I visited him in his cell. He spoke perfect Hochdeutsch, of course. He was a superb ventriloquist because he loved languages. He spoke four. He could be happy just saying words in different languages because they were so delicious to him. Some people love the taste of chocolate; Shumda loved the taste of words. Landesgericht, crйpuscule, piombo, zvinka. I can still see him: lying in bed after we’d made love, rolling difficult words off his tongue and smiling. He liked to talk as much as he liked to screw.

“He had led a charmed life, so he never truly believed they would punish him for your death. But it was a political year in Vienna and politicians love a scapegoat. Here was this showman, a ventriloquist from Romania, who had killed one of the city’s young flowers in front of hundreds of people. The case against him was clear. There was no question they would have executed him if I hadn’t saved him.”

“How did you do that?”

“I traded my life for his.”

“How did you… What do you mean?”

“Look at your hand, Miranda.”

I looked but saw nothing.

“No, turn it over. Look at your palm.”

It had no lines. Every one had vanished. My palm was smooth as paper. Smooth as skin anywhere else on your body, but not the hand. Not where your past and future are supposed to be mapped out by fate and will.

Disbelieving, I could not raise my eyes when Frances spoke again.

“Miranda!”

“What is this? Why—”

“Listen to me: There were lines on your hand when you entered that stadium. They disappeared when you realized what you are.”

“A vampire? When I realized I had lived all these lives? That’s when the lines disappeared?” I needed to repeat what she had said so I could fix it somewhere in my reeling mind. Despite the effort to remain sane, my voice teetered on the brink of something very bad. I could barely control myself.