“The shit you tried pulling on me back in grad school.”

  Sara and I both bite into our sandwiches, like that’s somehow the expected accompaniment to this bizarre conversation. Well, it might be bizarre to Sara, but it’s perfectly completely 2.7 billion percent ordinary as fucking crap to me.

  “I wasn’t pulling anything,” I say. “Then or now.”

  The ring is sitting on the table between us. It’s more like a paperweight, actually. Sara is not touching it, so I push it closer to her.

  “Take it. I mean it,” I say.

  “Well,” she says. “I did pick it out.”

  “Of course,” I say. “It’s all but yours anyway.”

  “You don’t really mean you’re giving Ryan back to me. Do you?”

  “Don’t you want him?”

  “I—” Sara eats some more of her sandwich and I eat some of mine too. It’s pretty good, and I wonder at how we paid for the food because no money, no credit cards, and not even a nod was exchanged during the silent transaction, if there was even such a thing as a transaction.

  But I have more important things to consider.

  “It seems that you do want him,” I say, “judging from the display back there.”

  “Well . . . I thought you wanted him.”

  “You mean because we’re married?”

  “That was one indication,” she says. “I have to get something to drink,” she says, and gets up and rushes away back to the drinks area, but she’s picked up the ring in the meanwhile and it’s on her left ring finger now. Where it belongs. My own hand feels tons lighter and very happy about the whole thing.

  When Sara returns with her drink, she lays her ring-clad hand on the table, displaying the whole effect with a kind of—well, I can’t help but say it—heavy-handed ostentation.

  “Delaney,” she says. “Could I ask you a favor?”

  “Sure,” I say. “As long as I can ask you one.”

  “Could you divorce him immediately?”

  “Why’s that?” I say.

  “Because, well, the clock’s ticking. Loudly.”

  Chapter 33

  “Can I divorce him today?” I say, because, what the fuck, my knowledge of the law is two decades old and anyway we’re in England, so maybe you can just walk around your spouse three or four—or seven—times and poof! you’re divorced.

  “Delaney,” Sara says. “This is no time for joking.”

  “You mean I can’t divorce him today?”

  “I mean today is . . . Well, I guess you could see a solicitor today. If you could get an appointment.” That last is said with a degree of sarcasm.

  “I’ll see if I can. Do you know a solicitor?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Delaney, you must know a dozen of them yourself,” Sara says, looking at me as though how could I not? when all I do is cavort with solicitors when I’m not busy stealing away her soul mate, making sure there aren’t any stray objects ruining the minimalism in my sterile apartment, analyzing investments, and, I don’t know, losing seven years of my life every fucking day.

  “Not anyone who handle divorces,” I say. I mean, I don’t know any solicitors. At all.

  “Why not try Martin Griffith?” she says with a kind of a sneer, and I half expect her to give me his card or something, except, like me, like everybody, Sara has no bag and nowhere to carry the business card of a solicitor unless she’s got like a secret pocket in her chic dress and keeps solicitors’ cards stashed away in there. If such things as cards still exist. And I think they must not.

  “I thought you knew Martin,” Sara says as she admires the yellowish outcropping on her left hand, flashing it around under the lights in the café.

  “It looks better on you,” I say, sidestepping the issue of Martin Griffith.

  “I wore it for a while before he gave it to you,” Sara says. “For a couple of weeks, actually,” she says, rubbing it in.

  “I really am seven years older than I was yesterday,” I say.

  I’ve got to use my time wisely, an attribute I remember getting a very bad grade in while in elementary school. Delaney defiantly waits until the last possible moment to start any project were some of the words my especially boring second-grade teacher etched into the annals of my official history.

  She gave me a D in Uses Time Wisely. My parents were enraged—at me, not at Mrs. Costa, which enragement I could never understand—but now that I see just how poorly I am using my time, I wonder if Mrs. Costa were correct. Or psychic.

  “You know, Delaney,” says Sara, still looking at her ring, my former ring, and not looking at me even for a second, “you pulled this same stunt in grad school and it didn’t go over very well then either. Did you think I’d forget?”

  “That was a long time ago—for you,” I say. “You could have forgotten.”

  “For you. That’s rich, Delaney.”

  “Sara, you’re the only person I know in London. Other than Ryan, anyway, and we’ve been friends for years. And I need to talk to someone, so it’s you.”

  “Talk,” says Sara, “but make it quick. I have to get back to the office.”

  “For the last three days, every morning I wake up seven years in the future. Seven years older. And I have no idea what happened during those years. Could you fill me in on the most recent seven years. At least?”

  “You will not let this prank go, will you? Is this some kind of fucked way of getting back at me because it’s so clear that Ryan loves me and not you?”

  “Didn’t I just give you my ring? And say I’d see Martin Whoever and get the divorce rolling immediately?”

  “Martin Whoever?” Sara laughs a sort of cynical little laugh. “If you don’t remember the last seven years, that means you’ve got a disease. You need to see a doctor.”

  “Got anyone in mind?”

  “I think you need Doctor Who. If it were me, I’d try for David Tennant. He’s old, but he’s much more appealing than that other guy, the one who’s doing it now. It’s the accent, I think. And the hair.”

  “Doctor Bloody Who? Sara, I’m asking you for help.”

  “Gotta run,” Sara says. She leaves her detritus on the table and gets up to leave.

  “What if I told you I’m pregnant?” I say.

  “What if? I’d think you were making that up like you make up everything else. Look here, Delaney.”

  Sara sits back down and finally gazes right at me. My best—or former—best friend.

  “This isn’t a joke. If you’re just giving me this ring and telling me you’ll divorce Ryan because it’s like a grandiose amusement to you, tell me right now. Because . . .” She starts crying a bit, sort of sniffling. “Because I couldn’t stand it.”

  “Fuck, Sara. Don’t cry. It’s not a joke. None of it is a joke. None. Of. It. I don’t want to be married to Ryan, I don’t know how the fucking fuck I ended up with him anyway, and I will divorce him, assuming I have enough time.”

  “You mean because you’ll be seven years older tomorrow, right? Yeah.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Because I’ll be seven years older tomorrow.”

  “Is this how you excuse yourself for everything? Saying you don’t remember the last seven years?”

  “I’m not excusing myself. I’m begging you to help me out.”

  “Well, I don’t have the time. I have a job. Not like some people who keep skipping out on their work, flouncing about, doing who-knows-what with who-knows-who—”

  “What?”

  “Don’t play coy with me. I’ve known about it for months. And so has Ryan.”

  “It?”

  “You. And Martin Whoever.”

  Chapter 34

  Sara’s gone. I finish my cheese sandwich while I contemplate the idea that the pregnancy confetti is celebrating not the festival of Ryan and Delaney but the festival of Martin and Delaney.

  This is really too much. I mean, even for me, a person who’s almost used to waking up seven years older every day at this point. But now I’m going to have the baby of a man I don’t even know? Who I’ve never laid eyes on? Who’s a goddamned solicitor?

  Who, by the by, I have no idea how to locate so I can at least take a gander at him and decide if I’d like to, you know, let him know he’s going to be a father, let myself know that this is the guy I had an affair with, and see if I think I can trust him enough to handle things for the six years and three hundred and sixty-four-plus-leap-year days I won’t be here to take care of the baby, who’ll turn into an actual child in the meanwhile.

  I get a chocolate chip cookie. It’s my one day in seven years. Might as well indulge myself. But there’s something wrong with the cookie—or with me—and it doesn’t taste right, so I pitch it along with the throw-away-ables from my and Sara’s lunches.

  The ring really does look better on her, you know. She wears it like she means it. I wore it like I wanted to get rid of it, which I did. And she picked it out, for fuck’s sake. Although the part where she also wore it for two weeks . . .

  It would’ve been interesting—as though I need anything more interesting than the cycle of the sevens I’m caught in—to know how I managed to get Ryan to marry me when he was and is so patently in love with Sara instead. Maybe Martin will know all about this. I mean, if he’s my lover, he probably knows all about me.

  This gives me the incentive to get up and try to find him. Somehow.

  I should have asked Sara, but she would’ve thought I was bullshitting her.

  Maybe I’m bullshitting myself. If so, I’m damn good at it.

  I walk out of the museum and toward the tube station. My brand-new fresh genius idea is that once I get on the train my body will just take me to Martin. Because even though I don’t know anything about the last seven years—or even yesterday, for one shiny example of a moment during those seven years—my subconscious must.

  Halfway to the station—well, approximately halfway, for all you precision junkies—an old man stops me and without saying a word, he hands me a card.

  I’m so shocked by this random event taking place right after I’d decided that there weren’t such things as business cards anymore that I don’t even say thank you to the guy. And I’m so further shocked by holding the card in my hand that before I actually look at it I’m thoroughly convinced that this card will have the address and contact information for Martin Griffith on it. Yeah, I do remember his last name.

  But the card says: your fate is your fortune. barter street at bury place.

  Barter and Bury. Is that my fortune right there? Trade something in exchange for my own funeral? Haven’t I already done that? I’ve traded my years by the sevens for a fast-approaching death.

  On my way to meet with my fate and fortune, I stumble across the Swedenborg Society, and I’m so tempted to go in that I do.

  After all, didn’t Emanuel Swedenborg himself have kind of a weird life? He might not’ve skipped ahead seven years for every day, but he went from being some kind of man-about-science to being a guy who communed with angels or God or the heavens sort of thing.

  How do I know this? I wrote a paper about him when I was a junior. And, yeah, I did all the reading and research and writing at the fucking last minute. And got an A, I’ll have you know.

  The Swedenborgians—if that’s what the people at the front desk are and, really, who else would be working here?—are very nice to me, and I think that when I’m finished browsing about I’ll ask one of them if they can give me Martin Griffith’s address, which I’ve misplaced, oh, silly forgetful me.

  We will not feel the workings of divine providence in our lives. I find this out as I check out the Laws of Divine Providence. Well, I have to agree with old dead Emanuel here. Because if there’s anything providential working in my life, I’m seeing only the effects and I’m blocked from discerning the causes.

  I start reading about how the physical world is a reflection of the spiritual world. I kinda remember this from the paper I wrote over twenty years ago and I can’t stand it. Not that I wrote the paper—well, I couldn’t stand that either—or that it was twenty years ago—although, fuck, I can’t stand that either—but that the physical world corresponds to the spiritual world.

  What the fucking fuck does that say about my spirit? And what would Swedenborg have to say about my campaign of carpet F-bombing?

  Fuck Swedenborg. Fuck Sara and Ryan. Fuck everything.

  I’m going to find my fate and fortune.

  Chapter 35

  Tucked into a crack between buildings—or so it seems to me—is a sliver of a sign with the word fortune on it. I peer into the window, see nothing and no one, then try the doorknob, which turns. So I go into the very narrow space.

  If the physical is an out-picturing of the spiritual, then this place will present me with only the most narrow of interpretations. Yet because of the yellowish and blueish lighting, the black wicker chairs, the dark purple geometric-patterned carpet on the floor, the table with an egret carved into its base, and the generally mysterious atmosphere of the place, it feels less like narrow and more like infinite in here.

  “Hello?” I say.

  Then a crazy thought flits through my head—okay, well, another crazy thought. I wonder if my baby will remember this moment, today. Will remember looking at the Rosetta Stone, giving Ryan back to Sara, going to the Swedenborg Society, and standing in this eerie yet reassuring room.

  Possibilities #15 and #16 start seeming right-on. I mean, only someone enchanted or a spirit (visible or invisible—yet I seem to be visible) would find the eerie reassuring. Actually, it’s kind of comforting in here. I sit in one of the black wicker chairs and reach out to the deck of cards on the egret-held-up table.

  “Ssssssst,” says a voice that sounds like it’s about three billion years old. I pull my hand back away from the cards.

  “No touching,” she says. She is a regulation, standard-issue, swathed in many-colored scarves and silk droopinesses fortune-teller. The gods hired her because she looked the part, and Clotho—isn’t she the one who spins the threads?—clothed her.

  “Sorry,” I say, although what I’m sorry about is that I didn’t get to touch the cards, not that I was going to.

  “I knew you’d be here today,” she says.

  “Well, of course you did. You’re a fucking fortune-teller!” Let’s see if she next tells me that I’m going to meet a tall, dark, handsome stranger and get happily married.

  “You’re Delaney Archer, aren’t you?” she says, which fucking stuns me. I mean, it’s one thing to tell the person who walks into your fortune-telling establishment that you were expecting them, but it’s quite another thing to know their name. My name.

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Lachesis,” she says, and it’s all I can do not to run out the door and go back to the Swedenborg Society and beg for asylum.

  “Not that Lachesis,” I say. “The one who measures the threads. The one who decides . . . you know . . . how long . . .” I can’t bring myself to say it, and anyway, if your name is Lachesis, you already know this shit.

  “I have another appointment in a few minutes, so your time is short,” she says as she sits across from me and picks up the cards that I wasn’t supposed to—and didn’t—touch. She starts shuffling them so expertly that I think she must moonlight at a casino.

  “My time is short,” I say.

  “The one who is on the path of the sevens may feel that way, it’s true,” says Lachesis.

  “How the holy hell do you know that?” I say.

  “Did I not bring you here?”

  “Did you?” Well, fuck, she did. “The card?”

  “No one has cards anymore,” Lachesis says. “Only you wouldn’t know that.”

  “Can you give me some advice?” I say. I mean, only a truly desperate person would be asking for some advice from the Fate who already measured out your life and knows the whole of it. Who decided the whole of it.

  “Let us consult the cards,” she says, makes a fan with them, and holds them out to me. “Choose.”

  Fuck me. I’m afraid to choose. I’ll admit it.

  “You choose,” I say. “You already did, anyway.”

  “You must choose,” she says. She has the voice of an ancient but the face of a young girl. I’m not just afraid of choosing, I’m afraid of her.

  I pick a card anyway, and she grabs it right out of my hand, before I have a chance to look at it.

  Then she throws the rest of the cards onto the floor, and they make a lovely yet horribly disturbing sound as they hit the carpet. I still can’t see the card I’ve chosen. I’m expecting it to be Death or the Hanged Man or something equally fatal.

  But it’s not a tarot deck I’ve chosen a card from, I see. It’s a regular old deck of playing cards.

  And I’ve chosen the seven of spades.

  Of course.

  Chapter 36

  “What would you like to know?” says Lachesis, who’s eyeing me with the experienced look of someone who already knows every fucking thing about my life.

  “What should I know?” I say.

  “You should know everything,” says the wiseass Lachesis, “but, alas, you do not.”

  “Alas?” I say as a bell sounds at the door. There’s a bell? There was no bell when I came in, I’m pretty sure.

  “One moment,” Lachesis says. “He’s early. He’s always early, no matter how many times I’ve told him there’s no point in it and he’ll just have to wait.”

  She unlocks the door, which I never saw her lock, sticks her head and shoulders in it, and says to the person who must be standing there but who I can’t see, “A few more minutes. I have a very important client.”

  “I’ll wait,” says the masculine voice outside.

  Lachesis closes and relocks the door. This time I see and hear her work the lock.

  “I’m lost,” I say when she sits back down.

  “That much is obvious,” she says very very very unhelpfully and even more annoyingly.

  “Why am I on the journey of the sevens?” I say. Get the biggest of the big questions out of the way first thing.

 

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