The Last Time We Met

8

I had never been to Golden Gate Park, despite living less than an hour away. We drove along the coast with the windows down. Cedric had his hand on my thigh again, which felt like the promise of something. I made several wrong turns thinking about what we'd done yesterday and wondering when we'd be able to do it again.

When we stepped out of the car and I got a sense of how big the park was, and realizing that without a bicycle we could never visit all of the places Theodore had gone in my vision, I said, "Let's go to the Japanese Garden."

The garden looked a little different from what I remembered, but the koi ponds were still there, and the moon bridge, and the thatch-roofed tea house. New to me was a pagoda high up on a hill, and a zen garden.

"After the earthquake in 1906, they used this park as a refugee camp," I told Cedric.

"Cool," he said, peering down at the koi fish. "This whole place is really cool. Almost like I'm in Japan."

He seemed to want to stop and look around. I indulged him, taking photos of him on the moon bridge and arranging artful shots of the foliage and the landmarks. But what I was really looking for was the bench where Theodore had seen Henrietta reading her book.

"Let's get some tea." Cedric tugged at my hand. "Maybe they have some snacks, too."

Then I saw it: the bench across from the pond. It wasn't the same bench – at some point in the past century it must have been replaced. But it was in the same location. Suddenly I was dragging Cedric by the hand until we were both sitting there.

"Wha--? Okay, James, what is happening right now?" He was smiling at me in a confused way. "Why do you look like we just found something way more exciting than a bench?"

I grinned at him, waiting for him to make the connection. Only he didn't feel the same way I felt. He didn't remember sitting on this bench in a previous life. Nothing about this place felt familiar to him. I scrambled to think of some other reason why I had just done what I did.

"Go stand over there, by the pond," I told him, holding up my camera as an explanation.

"Oka-ay," he sang as he stood and skipped across the path to the stones that marked the edge of the water. He turned to face me, putting his hands on his hips.

I raised the camera, but something wasn't quite right. For one, he was wearing a green E.T. t-shirt. "Turn around," I called.

He did as he was told, though he looked back over his shoulder and gave me a shimmy. "Like this?"

"Be serious!" I laughed. "Look out at the water. Like, contemplatively."

Lips pressing together, Cedric held back his laughter. "You want me to do a majestic?"

I lowered the camera again. "A what?"

"A majestic. You know, one of those pretentious Instagram photos where the person is looking off into middle distance like they're contemplating the beauty of nature, and they caption it with some quote like Not all who wander are lost or Two roads diverged in a wood and I took the one less traveled by."

Cedric looked at me like this was a photography term I should be familiar with. I shook my head.

"Sometimes I forget you're new on Insta. Yeah, that shit's everywhere. My sister and I used to hike a lot and she loved to take majestics. She thought it was funny that I called them that but she still posted them anyway. And not ironically."

Looking down at my camera, I wondered if this was all a stupid idea. Having a photo of Cedric in the same pose that I'd dreamed Henrietta in wasn't going to make that past life any more real. But I could see it so clearly in my head, how Henry had looked that day, with her dress fluttering in the wind as she rose up from wetting her handkerchief in the pond. It had been just a moment, the moment I thought – the moment Theodore thought he'd lost her, when she'd been taken by the beauty of this place.