This is a short story that I wrote back in 2002 or 2003. It is one of only two short stories that I have ever had published, and it was accepted by the first publisher I sent it to. I believe his words, in the letter of acceptance, were: "Of course I want to publish it." It was published in 2003 in the Eureka Literary Magazine. I re-read this short story today for the first time in a very long time, and I thought that it was pretty good.

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And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love.
But the greatest of these is love.

~ I Corinthians 13:13


I was in Africa when I got the news that she had died.

My mother sent word via telegram. It came through our office in Mwanza, and was delivered to me via courier. In the days before cell phones and laptops, the only link to the outside world from the depths of the Tanzanian savannah was through the agile feet of the local tribesmen.

I remember the night vividly.

It was a cool evening, with a breeze blowing in from the west, off Lake Victoria. In the distance, a pack of hyenas yowled and hooted as they finished off the remains of a carcass. The courier came padding up to our campsite, his footsteps audible from a thousand yards distant.

When I first opened the telegram and read the words, I was struck by how odd and out of place it all seemed. This was the last piece of news I’d expected on such a quiet, tranquil African night.

I stood up from my perch near the campfire and walked out into the encircling darkness. The sky overhead was awash with stars, twinkling and sparkling just as they had for billions of years. The moon hung in the west, going through its nightly routine, unaffected by this unsettling news. At that moment, the futility of the human species struck me like never before. I realized, perhaps for the first time in my life, how abominably small and vulnerable we all are. A bunch of advanced primates, stuck on the side of a blue planet in a minor solar system. Our collective humanity no more meaningful than a match: ignited, flared, burned, and gone, all in a matter of cosmic seconds. And afterward, nothingness. Eventually, our blue planet would turn to brown, then black. Then it would be sucked into our dying sun’s gravitational pull, and when it was all over, there would be no trace of us. Not so much as a single nanoparticle left over to carry on our distinct human spirit. Our successors in the galaxy would have no more knowledge and understanding of our existence than Julius Caesar had of computerized axial tomography.
I looked up at the moon and realized that I, too, would die someday, and when I did, the moon would still rise and make its nightly journey, and the stars would still twinkle and sparkle in the African sky. They would not care that I was dead, just as they did not care that she was dead.

Rebecca was her name. When I had known her, she’d had a mane of brunette hair, straight and long, with a subtle beauty that was both mysterious and tantalizing. Her mother had been of Buddhist ancestry, and her father a Jew, and her multi-cultural background only added to her allure. She had dark, almond eyes, and a brilliant smile that lit her face with an ethereal glow.

We’d grown up only ten miles from each other, near Lexington in central Kentucky, but had never met until we crossed paths in Indonesia, while working with the Peace Corps.

It had been that smile that first caught my attention.

I was standing beside a reed hut on the island of Buru, feet crossed, examining a small mosquito bite on my arm, when I heard someone approaching.

“You’ll want to make sure you clean that with peroxide,” a woman’s voice said.
I looked up, and our eyes met. She was smiling, and the radiance of the expression hit me like a punch. “I’m Rebecca,” she said, extending her hand in greeting.

I shook it. “Nice to meet you. I’m Jake. You must be our new doctor.”

She nodded, a supple, graceful movement like the sway of a giraffe. “That’s right. They just drove me in from Wamsasi.”

“Pleasant drive?” I asked, knowing it was not.

She smiled again and I felt a little burst in my stomach. “It was…Interesting.”

I chuckled. “I’m sure it was. Come on inside here, I’ll introduce you to Finny.”

She followed me inside. The hut was small, furnished the way you’d expect a hut in the Indonesian rain forest to be furnished: a bamboo desk, a few cots, a table. Behind the desk sat a young Indonesian man of about twenty-eight.

“Rebecca, meet Arifin,” I said. “Finny for short. He’s our translator. Knows sixty-five local and regional languages and dialects.”

The two of them shook hands.

“I didn’t catch your last name, Rebecca,” Finny said in his clipped, distinct English.

“Marks. Rebecca Marks.”

“Doctor Rebecca Marks,” I corrected her.

“Oh, so you are the new doctor,” Finny said. “Wonderful. Well, nice to meet you Dr. Marks.”

“Rebecca, please.”

Finny smiled and nodded.

Rebecca and I stepped back outside into the balmy afternoon.

“So are you new to the Peace Corps?” I asked her.

She nodded, sliding a strand of long, silky hair behind her ear. It was a movement that was simple and nonchalant, yet strangely alluring. The way she tucked the lock behind her ear, with a little carefree flip of her fingers. It was the motion of a woman who loved being alive, and who was completely at ease with herself. That otherwise innocuous act seemed to exemplify her very being, her very humanity.

“I only finished my residency a few months ago,” she said. “So I’m still pretty green.”

“Well, I can barely apply a Band-Aid without sticking one end to the other, so don’t feel bad. I’m sure you’re a wonderful doctor.”

She looked at me and smiled curiously. “What makes you say that?”

Her question took me off guard, and I stumbled over my words. “Well, I don’t know you just seem – uh, well…Competent, I guess.”

She laughed delightedly – and delightfully. “It must be these muddy sandals and the cut-off shorts,” she joked. I was so taken in by her charm, I had barely noticed her attire.

“Yeah, that’s probably it,” I said, smiling. In reality, that was part of it. She didn’t take herself too seriously, didn’t have the self-aggrandizing attitude of some others in her profession. She was down-to-earth. Real.
I was already in love with her, and I’d only known her for ten minutes. But I felt like I’d known her a lifetime, or maybe even several lifetimes.

After that initial meeting, our relationship soared.

She had walked into my life rather unexpectedly (when we were told a new doctor was coming, I assumed it would be a man), and it was as though we were made for each other. I never felt uncomfortable around her, never felt that I couldn’t tell her what was on my mind. Nothing was taboo, nothing too personal to reveal. We were soul mates from Kentucky, teamed up in the Indonesian rain forests, bound by a common love of people and wildlife, and united by our determination to lend our services wherever they were needed.

We lived there together, in the little village on Buru, for nearly two years. And though we were the best of friends, and though my heart melted each time she flashed that pristine smile, and though I took her to be the most beautiful person I’d ever known, our relationship was purely Platonic. I was in love with her. Don’t doubt that fact for a minute. But back then, I was selfish. Too career-oriented. Too fixed on my own goals. There was no room in my plan for anything unexpected, even a relationship with the most perfect woman on earth.

And even when she asked for my heart, staring up at me with those liquid brown eyes, holding my hand in her warm, supple palm, I told her no. It wasn’t easy. She argued that we were old souls, created as an extension of one another, two halves broken apart at conception, now in need of reuniting. I told her that our lives had converged in this spot, in this little jungle village in Southeast Asia, but that our roads were bound for different destinations, running parallel for a while, but certain to veer off in opposite directions.

Though she never agreed with it, and certainly never understood it, she accepted it with all the grace, charm, and good-humor that were the hallmarks of her personality. We remained close, relying on one another and working together for the good of the people of Buru, and when our tenure together was over, she hugged me, kissed me on the cheek, and gave a knowing squeeze to my hand as she saw me onto the boat in Wamsasi.

I waved to her as the little skiff pulled out into the choppy waters of the Banda Sea. It was the last time I ever saw her.

It’s strange. I only knew her for two years of my life. And though we spent the majority of our time together during those two years, it represents only a small sliver of my life’s journey. Yet, it’s as though we had been together for all the years before we met, and all the years after we parted. Those two years, in my mind, stretched out for a lifetime.

After my tenure in the Peace Corps, I went back to the states to finish my degree in Zoology. Within five years, I was filming in Kenya and Tanzania. I have traveled to more than forty-five countries, and filmed more than two-hundred wildlife documentaries. I have honorary degrees from four universities. I have dined with presidents and kings, and I have lobbied before the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, and the United Nations.

But my biggest regret has always been Rebecca.

She stayed in the Peace Corps. After I left, she remained in Buru for another three years, then was transferred to Timor. After two years working in a hospital there, she took a yearlong sabbatical and went home to Kentucky. We were going to meet one time during that year, but duty called, and I was forced to cancel my trip. After that, she went back to the Peace Corps, and her last assignment was in Burma, helping to establish a new medical facility in the town of Kyaukme, about seventy-five miles east of Mandalay.

We stayed in contact with letters, and occasionally by phone, but as old friends are wont to do, we corresponded less and less as the years wore on. When I got the telegram on that tranquil Tanzanian night, it had been nearly a year since I’d last heard from her.

How would our lives have been different, I wonder, if I had gone with my heart, instead of thinking only of my career? I might never have become a well-respected zoologist and filmmaker, but she also might still be alive today. In a way, I suppose, my ambition is to blame for her death. Without it, we might have forged a life together, somewhere else, somewhere different, in a faraway place where Rebecca would still be alive, and I could still hold her hand and feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek.

She died on a lonely night, in a lonely bed inside the very hospital she had helped establish in Kyaukme. A single nurse was by her side when she passed from the land of the living, holding her hand as she made that terrifying journey through death’s dark threshold. Rebecca had fallen victim to an illness that had run rampant for three months through much of rural eastern Burma. She had treated dozens of patients for the same malady, and finally succumbed to it herself. I don’t even know what it was. I’m not sure I want to know. What entity could stop the whirlwind of life, love, and passion that was Rebecca Marks? She’d had such vigor, such vitality. Such fire. It seemed abominably unfair that such a person could be ended when there was still so much life left to live and so much love left to be given.

The morning after receiving my mother’s telegram, I left our camp in the Serengeti and was in Dar Es Salaam by the afternoon. From there, I caught a flight to Cairo, then to London, Boston, and finally Lexington. Within forty-eight hours of hearing of her death, I was standing inside her parents’ kitchen in central Kentucky.
Their house was at the center of a small farm in northern Fayette County. It was within the city limits, but you would never have known. Green hills rolled away in every direction, and only at night did the city seem close, glowing on the southern horizon.

“She left this for you,” her father said to me, handing me an envelope. I’d only been there about five minutes.

I took the envelope, turned it over in my hands. It was plain, with only my name written on the front. “She left it for me?”

Her father shrugged, his eyes tired, rimmed in red. “She knew she had a dangerous job,” he said, a hint of regret in his voice. “She was nothing if not a realist.”

I nodded. That much was true. She used to tell me she knew she’d probably give her life for her work someday. She was at peace with that, I think. “How old is this letter?”

“The last time she was home – oh, it’s been almost a year and a half now – she told us she had some things that were to be given out if she died. Her own version of a will, I guess. It was just a shoebox full of letters.” He sat down and sighed, the weight of his grief evident in his bowed back. “She said not to open any of them until after the funeral.”

My God, I thought. Had she expected to die? I looked at the plain, white envelope in my hand again. There was a piece of paper inside. Folded notebook paper. I slid the envelope in my jacket pocket.

The funeral was unbearable. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I stayed in the back, with barely a glance at the opened casket. They buried her in a small cemetery near her parents’ home, next to the church where she’d grown up.

When it was all over, I hugged her parents, and promised to stay in touch. I left on a plane three hours later, and was back in Tanzania within a matter of days.

Looking back on it, I don’t know why I didn’t open the letter right away. I think I was scared. Scared of how I might react, hearing her speak to me from the grave. I fully expected it to be a heart-rending manifesto, telling me of her deep love for me, and how our two years together were the best two of her life.

It turned out it wasn’t that at all.

A week after arriving back in Tanzania, I finally opened the letter. I was sitting in my tent late at night, an oil lamp burning at my makeshift desk. The rains were coming, and the flap on the window whipped and snapped in the breeze. I slit the envelope with a knife and eased the letter out. Holding it up to the light, I read the single phrase: Dear Jake, I hereby bequeath to you my house in Scott County, Kentucky.

That was all it said. No hello, no goodbye, no painful memories, no tear-stained words. Just a simple statement in legalese. I must have stared at it for an hour. It was her handwriting alright, but it wasn’t her. It wasn’t the vibrant, life-loving creature that I had known. It was a cold, lifeless phrase, as though she’d already been dead when she had written it.

I was confused and perplexed. Why would she leave me her house, one which we had never been inside together, and one which she herself had only lived in on rare occasions? I wasn’t even sure exactly where it was. To the best of my knowledge, it was just an old place out in the countryside between Lexington and Cincinnati, a place that had been mostly empty for the fifteen years Rebecca had owned it. And why would she tell me about it like this? With an impersonal letter, written with unnecessary formality, and hand-delivered by her father with instructions not to read it until after her funeral?

It seemed a mystery, but one which I wanted to pursue further.

It took a while, and I had to postpone the start of a new documentary, but I finally made it back to Kentucky. I had decided to take some time off. I would move into Rebecca’s house as she had wished, and take time to reflect on everything.

There was a lot of legal wrangling, of course. In addition to her letters, Rebecca had drawn up a formal will, but it took some time for her home and property in Scott County to be officially turned over to my name. Once the lawyers had had their say, I loaded my belongings into the back of my Land Rover, and drove north out of Lexington, following a map supplied to me by Rebecca’s parents.

Throughout the legal process, I had never seen the home. I wanted my first visit there to be special and intimate. I wanted to be able to go inside, sit down, spread out, take in the atmosphere. I didn’t want a lawyer standing over my shoulder appraising anything or shoving any documents into my hands.

It was a warm Saturday evening in May, and I drove through Georgetown, past the little college there and all the quaint shops along Main Street. Within minutes, the town was past and I was in the countryside, the setting sun casting long, golden rays across the rolling bluegrass hills. Horses and cattle grazed in the wide-open fields, and sycamore trees overhung pre-Civil War stone fences, colored brown and green with time.

Following the map, I turned off the main road and found myself on a tree-lined lane, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. It wound through thickening woods, over hills and streams, deep into the countryside. I made another turn and came around a wide bend, passing an old barn with a caved-in roof, a disheveled sentry watching over an abandoned field blue with cornflower. I found the dirt road indicated on the map as Rebecca’s driveway. It cut back through an area that was mostly wooded, running for nearly a mile before opening into a clearing.

I rolled to a stop before the house.

It was vast, a gothic Civil War era home with a watchtower in the center and rows of windows spreading to the left and right. The landscaping was in need of attention, and the grass was thick and full of weeds, but the home and grounds seemed otherwise in good repair. It sat on about an acre of cleared land, hemmed in on all sides by trees, completely secluded.

I stepped out of my Land Rover and stood, listening. Sounds of nature emanated all around me, completely undisturbed by any artificial noises. The place was peaceful and serene, if not a little creepy. Dusk was just settling in the sky overhead, and the house seemed dark and somewhat mournful, as if it knew that Rebecca was never coming back. It didn’t seem happy that I was there.

Digging the key out of my pocket, I walked up the front porch stairs and unlocked the door. Pushing it open, I stepped inside the foyer. Hardwood floors spread out in all directions, and a staircase wound up into the watchtower overhead. The house was still furnished with Rebecca’s things: the furniture she’d gathered in her lifetime, all the trinkets she couldn’t take with her to the far corners of the earth. Despite the fact that she’d spent very little time here, the place seemed imbued with her presence. I felt as though I might call out her name and hear her voice answer me in the gathering gloom.

I shook the thought away.

That first night in Rebecca’s house was strange, unnerving. I slept in her bedroom, in her bed, under the very sheets where she had once lain. At her funeral, her father had told me she’d last been here about a year and a half ago. But it had been another six months since then. So two years had passed since she’d been inside the place. I wondered if the bedclothes had ever been changed.
The night seemed to last an eternity, and when the first vestiges of morning sun finally came creeping through the window, I wasn’t sure if I had slept at all.

In the end, nearly twenty nights passed before I saw her for the first time.

I was lying in bed with only the bedside lamp burning, reading in the quiet of the night. It was late, after midnight, and the only sound in the house was the steady breathing of my dog at the foot of the bed.

As I lay there reading, I heard Tor begin to growl, one of those deep, guttural growls dogs make when they sense danger. My eyes shot up from the book. There, standing near the foot of the bed, was Rebecca. Not a ghostly apparition, a see-through Rebecca-thing draped in hazy white gowns, but a real, live, warm-blooded person, standing ten feet away from me, dressed in khaki shorts and a short-sleeved shirt. She was just staring at me with those almond eyes, a pensive expression on her face.

I felt my heart catch in my throat, and cold chills swept my body like an arctic breeze. For several seconds I didn’t breathe. Tor crouched in a defensive posture, the hairs on his back standing to attention. He bared his teeth and barked. Rebecca didn’t seem to notice. She just kept staring at me.

I was frozen in my spot, not knowing how to react. What do you do, after all, when you see a dead person suddenly standing before you? I finally did the only thing that seemed natural at the time – I reached over and turned out the light. When I turned it back on, she was gone.

The next day, I tried to reason with myself. It was a hallucination. A figment of my imagination, born out of the emotion of her death. Living in her house, among her things, sleeping in her bed, using her bathroom, cooking in her kitchen…All these things might lead to strange sightings and visions. But no. It just didn’t add up. I might well have been capable of hallucinating, but what about Tor? Surely my grief and emotions didn’t extend to him.

The next night, she came again. This time she smiled at me, that radiant smile that I remembered so well. The hallmark of her existence. Again Tor saw her too, and again he growled and barked. I left the light on this time, and after a few minutes, she turned and walked out of the room. I got the impression she wanted me to follow her, but when I jumped out of bed and stepped into the corridor outside, she was nowhere to be seen.

After that, I didn’t see her again for some time. I felt disturbed and distraught, scared, but curious. By day, I went about my normal routine: caring for the flowerbeds, cultivating the small garden out back, mowing the acre yard, observing the wildlife, and doing a lot of reading. And by night I stalked the house like a prowler, Tor at my side, looking for any sign of her.

Then, after about two weeks, I was awakened one night by a whisper in my ear.

Serendipity, the voice said.

I had been sleeping fitfully, plagued by dreams and nightmares, and the whispered word was like a lightning bolt through me. I sat straight up in bed, panting, my heart racing. The room was empty, the moon glowing in through the window. Tor was awake, ears perked in the darkness as if he’d heard it too.

Though the voice had been a whisper, I was certain it was hers. I had heard her whispered voice dozens of times, when we would lay awake at night in the Indonesian jungle, side by side on two cots, talking about the day’s events or some other issue that seemed important at the time.

Serendipity. What had she meant by that?

I lay awake the rest of the night, the covers pulled up to my chin, staring wide-eyed around the room. The disembodied voice had scared me more than even the sight of her at the foot of my bed. It seemed to resound in my ears, as if it were trapped inside my head.

Serendipity.

The next day, I found an old dictionary inside a bookshelf in the library. Pulling it off the shelf, I sat down at the desk, dusted the binding, and opened it to the S’s.

Serendipity (sèr´en-dîp¹î-tê) noun
The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.
[From Persian Sarandip, Sri Lanka, from Arabic Sarandib.]

I knew what the word meant, but seeing the definition before me brought meaning to the utterance that I hadn’t considered before then. Was she trying to tell me that she had discovered something, or was she prodding me to make my own fortunate discoveries?

I glanced back down at the page. The word was apparently derived from the ancient Persian name for Sri Lanka. If I wasn’t mistaken, Rebecca had spent some time in Sri Lanka a few years back. In fact, it was her last assignment before being sent to Burma. Could there be a connection there?
I looked up, sighing. I had been seated for nearly fifteen minutes, hunched over the dictionary in concentration. I leaned back to stretch, and when I did, my eyes fell across the mirror that hung over the desk.

And there she was, Rebecca, standing in the doorway behind me. I swung around with a gasp, gooseflesh rising on my skin.

Nothing.

I went to the door and looked out into the corridor beyond. It was empty and forlorn.

I called her name. “Rebecca!” I waited, but only silence answered me.

Stepping back inside the library, I shook my head, trying to clear it. Was it all in my mind? Some sort of self-induced visual fallacy? Could even Tor’s growling, on the previous sightings, have been merely my imagination? A grand hallucination, like an acid dream? I looked in the mirror again. This time, the doorway was just as it should have been: empty.

Maybe I was going insane.

A few days later, I was sitting in the den, reclining on a plush leather couch, when I found myself staring at the pendulum clock on the wall. It was an antique by the look of it, fashioned from carved mahogany, and ornamented with brass fixtures and an elaborately decorated face. Something struck me odd about it, and I finally realized what it was…The clock was ticking, and was set to the proper time. This seemed a major revelation, because I had never touched it. Who, then, had been winding it? Who had set the hands to the appropriate time?

I stood and walked over to it, examining it closer. It really was a work of art, hand-carved with such intricate detail that it seemed more fit for a museum than a secluded home in central Kentucky. I leaned down and read the imprint on the underside.

Made in Sri Lanka.

For a moment I just stared at the words. Then I looked back at the clock face. The brass fixtures were polished and shiny, and for a moment I saw her reflection in the metal. A flash of ghostly white skin, with nut-brown eyes like two peach pits, and a mane of dark hair swept back over her shoulders. The image played across the honey-colored brass, twisted and distorted by the angle, and then was gone.
I wheeled around, but knew I would find nothing there.
I was scared and disturbed, but determined to find out what message Rebecca was trying to send me. What was the connection between serendipity and Sri Lanka? Had she discovered something while she was there? Was the clock just another clue, or did it itself hold the secret? Was there a secret at all, or was I just making it all up, the mind-games of a man in mourning?

I examined the clock again. Aside from the stamp indicating it was made in Sri Lanka, and the connection between Sri Lanka’s ancient name and the whispered word I’d heard a few nights earlier, I had no reason to believe the clock had any special significance. Maybe it was just intuition, but I reached up and felt along the top of the clock, to see if anything was there. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find.
At first, there was nothing. Only dust. But then I let my fingers run all the way to the back, and they brushed across something flat and small. A key. I picked it up. It was just a standard metal key, small, like the key to a jewelry box or padlock. I slipped it inside my pocket.

The house was big, and it was furnished with decades of accumulated furniture. (In fact, I suspected that whoever had sold the house to Rebecca had sold her their furniture and belongings as well. Maybe it had been the home of an old person who had died without an heir.) In any event, it was nearly a week before I finally discovered what the key was for.

It was early afternoon, and I was in the living room, seated at the Steinway that was the centerpiece of the room. It was a full size grand, and despite the months of disuse, it was in moderately good tune. I am no Liberace, and I’m lucky to get all the way through Für Elise without a mistake, but I enjoy playing, particularly when no one is around to hear. I had been seated at the piano for about twenty minutes when the thought struck me that there might be some sheet music in the bench. I leaned over to open it, and found it was locked. My memory kicked in, and I immediately tried the little key from the clock.

Bingo.

I opened the lid and stared inside.

There was an old photograph, black and white, grainy with the passage of time, lying in the bottom. It was the only thing inside the bench. It looked like a snapshot done on glass plates, like those old pictures you see from the Civil War. It depicted a man and woman sitting on a large rock in what was apparently a jungle. A few natives stood in a cluster behind them, watching with great interest. It looked like a picture from an early copy of National Geographic.

I picked it up gently. It was yellowed along the edges, torn at the bottom. On the back, a caption was scrawled in faded ink: Robert and Martha, Ceylon, 1889.

I stared at the words. Ceylon, 1889. Ceylon, I knew, was the old British Imperialist name for…Sri Lanka. This was a photograph of two people – apparently European or American travelers, or perhaps explorers – in the jungles of Sri Lanka in the late years of the nineteenth century.

Instead of clearing things up, the discovery only deepened the mystery. What was Rebecca trying to tell me?

Late that night, long after I had fallen to sleep, she visited me again. I awoke quite suddenly in the quiet of the night, finding myself wide-eyed in the darkness. Tor was sound asleep at my feet, and didn’t see her when she appeared. It was as if she materialized out of the wall: one moment she was not there, the next she was walking toward me across the room. Real clothes, real skin, real body. The movements were just as I remembered them. The way the arms swung freely at her sides, they way she shifted her shoulders and hips. It was all classic Rebecca. This was no imitation. She stopped right beside me, and for a moment I thought she was going to climb in bed with me. But instead she just smiled and said, “It’s in the watchtower.”

I’m not sure exactly what happened after that. I awoke with sunlight filtering in through the window and Tor stretching by my feet. Perhaps I had fainted dead away after she spoke to me. Perhaps I had just been dreaming. But either way, I knew where I needed to go.

I had been inside the watchtower on a couple of occasions, but hadn’t spent much time there. It was where Rebecca’s office had been, and although I had been meaning to look through some of the shelves and drawers up there, I hadn’t gotten around to it. The tower was sort of creepy and cold, and with my recent propensity for seeing ghosts, it was the last place I wanted to while away lonely hours.

Taking the photograph of Robert and Martha with me, I mounted the stairs. It was about ten o’clock in the morning, and sunlight filtered in from above and below, but it was still dim. The stairs wound upward in a spiral, until emerging into the room at the top. The office was small and classically furnished. Curved windows were set into each wall, affording a splendid view of the surroundings, and a small desk sat at the head of the room. There were a few maps, a globe, and a couple of bookshelves. An oriental rug covered the hardwood floor. And there was a coffee mug on the desk…I had noticed it once before, and had been too disturbed by it to take it downstairs and wash it. Clearly she had left it there the last time she’d been home. It even had a stain in the bottom.

I looked around the room. What was it in here that she wanted me to see? It’s in the watchtower, she had said. What was in the watchtower? I scanned the bookshelves. A bunch of dusty volumes, mostly textbooks and medical journals. A few novels. Nothing stood out to me.

Perhaps there was something in the desk. I sat down in the chair and began opening drawers.

And that’s when I found it.

An envelope. With my name on it.

With trembling hands, I opened it. Inside was another photograph, and a letter. The photograph, like the one I’d found in the piano bench, was old and grainy, yellowed along the edges. There were Robert and Martha again, standing, this time, before a large house…This house, I realized with a start. Yes, indeed. There they were, standing side-by-side, right in front of the very house in which I now sat. The picture was dated 1889, just like the other one. It must have been taken right before they left for Sri Lanka, or just after they returned.

Shaken, I sat the picture aside and took the letter. It was long, handwritten, in Rebecca’s familiar style. I began to read.

My Dearest Jake:

I suppose if you are reading this, then my destiny is complete. I hope my parents took the news well. I know they’ve spent their lives worrying about me, and I guess it was for good reason. I always wanted to work with people, and help people, and do my part for the betterment of humanity. I guess danger goes with the territory. But you know this.

I’m sure you have a lot of questions, particularly about Robert and Martha , and I can understand if you’re a little confused, and unnerved. I’m sorry it has to be this way. But don’t worry. You aren’t losing your mind.

The first time we met, I remember being struck by how strong my feelings were for you. Even that very first day, when I approached you by the hut, and you were standing there fingering that place on your arm, my first thought was that you were my soul mate. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? But I have always trusted my instincts, and they have never failed me. I don’t think they failed me that time either. Back then, I didn’t understand any of it. I knew what I felt, but I didn’t know why. I just thought it was love at first sight.

But as it turns out, Jake, it wasn’t first sight at all. Not by a long shot.
Five years ago, when I was working in Sri Lanka, I stumbled upon something quite by accident. I had taken a short leave from our base camp, and was spending the week in the urban capital, away from the creeping jungles. I had been doing some research on Sri Lankan history, and while in the library, I came upon the story of two American anthropologists who had worked in Sri Lanka in the 19th century, when it was still a British colony named Ceylon.

Thus, I was introduced to Robert and Martha. At first, I thought they were a husband and wife team. Turns out, they were just colleagues. Neither was married. I was reminded of you and me. Bittersweet memories.

Robert and Martha spent a year in Ceylon, living with and studying several native tribes on the island’s interior. When they returned to the States, they published a thesis on their discoveries. I read it. It was boring stuff, really. In reality, the two of them were much more interesting than their subjects.

It was while researching their lives that I came upon a startling discovery. Why I was researching their lives in the first place, I can not say. It was like some sort of primal urge. I wanted to know about these people. They intrigued me in a way that was, at the time, completely unexplainable. I just felt a natural affinity for them.

What I discovered was that Martha had owned, and lived in, my house in Scott County. The one you’re living in now.

What were the chances, Jake, that I would randomly buy this house after medical school – a house that I knew I was never going to spend much time in – and then ten years later find myself doing research, for no good reason, on some obscure anthropologists that I had come across in Sri Lanka, and find that one of them had owned the very same house? It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

Turns out, it was serendipity.

I became obsessed with Robert and Martha. I wanted to learn everything I could about them. During a leave of absence in the States, I learned that Martha had owned the house about fifteen years, but that she spent very little time in it, living there mainly between her journeys across the globe. I also learned that she died suddenly when she was in her mid-forties, cut down by a disease she caught from a sick native in some far-flung country. According to her family records (yes, I even interviewed a few of her relatives), she spent her entire life in the service of others, and longed for the companionship of Robert – a longing that was never reciprocated. She and Robert were partners, and worked together on several occasions, but he had his career, and apparently didn’t want it derailed by the demands of a family. In time, they grew apart, and when she died, he was halfway across the globe, involved in some important work in the Congo.

He was crushed by her death. Taken unawares. It sent his career spiraling out of control, and he never published another paper or gave another speech or taught another course. He lived to be seventy-four, but never married. And he never got over his grief for Martha’s loss, and for the loss of their future, which he, through his stubbornness, had denied them.

This house, this property, seems imbued with her presence. I think some of the furniture might actually date all the way back to the time when she lived here. Certainly some of the pictures in the den and the study belonged to her.

Jake, I believe she was me. That I am her. We lived in different bodies, in different centuries, but I believe we share a soul. And Jake, I believe the same is true for you and Robert. I remember telling you once that we were old souls, like two halves broken apart at conception, destined to be put back together. At the time, those were just feelings I couldn’t explain. Now I can. We are old souls, Jake. Two pieces of the same part, moving through a cycle of lives that always end the same way…With my early death, and with your decades of grief and regret.

You may be asking yourself, “Why didn’t she tell me sooner?” Why have I waited until after my death to let you in on my discovery? Because the endless cycle can only be broken by you, Jake. It’s my destiny. It’s your destiny. You must make the decision. And so I’m choosing to let you know now, so that the next time around, we might make things right. It’s too late for this life. What is done can not be undone. We have to learn from our past and apply that to our future. And that decision rests with you.

Don’t mourn for me, Jake. I loved my work. I would have gladly given my life for it. God granted me a special gift for helping others and giving of myself. I wouldn’t be me if I was worried about the dangers of my work. And I know that when this life is over, I’ll have another chance, another opportunity to make things work. Another opportunity to spend my life with you.

A career isn’t everything, Jake. Careers fulfill a certain need, and careers help us pay our bills, but it’s who we love and who we are loved by that really matters. That’s what makes us who we are.

It’s serendipity, Jake. We weren’t supposed to discover these things. Martha never did. Robert never did. But we have. We have discovered them. We are the fortunate ones. We are the ones who can break the endless cycle.
Until then, I await you, my love.

Rebecca

I first read those words over twenty years ago. Twenty years of questioning, of wondering what might have been. Twenty years to contemplate what I lost when I chose my career over my heart.

As for the things I experienced inside Rebecca’s house, I can’t explain any of it. I can’t explain how it was that she appeared to me in the silence of the night. How she spoke to me, and whispered in my ear. I can’t explain the apparitions in the mirror, and in the face of the clock.

Maybe I imagined it all. A vivid hallucination. Maybe my discovery of the photographs and of the letter were just…Serendipity.

One thing I do know is that her words were true. I had even felt it myself for many years before her death…I just hadn’t understood it. It took her discovery in Sri Lanka, and her subsequent ghostly visits to me, to open my eyes to the truth of my feelings.

Tomorrow, I will celebrate my seventy-fourth birthday.

After that, it shouldn’t be long at all.

And next time around, with the grace of God, and Rebecca’s radiant smile, I will forge the life I was meant to lead.

And I will love. Always love.