The Reunion

She came back in the way she always came back: without announcement, without ceremony, as though she had simply always been standing in that street and I had been the one who moved away.

It had been nearly a hundred years.

I will say that plainly and let you sit with what it means: nearly a hundred years. A mortal life, complete from birth to death, had passed in the interval between one meeting and the next. Wars. A continent reshaping itself. Generations of human beings living their full allotment and making their deaths and being forgotten. I had blood-bound men and then released them and watched them die of age. I had moved and purchased and managed and played the roles required. And through all of it the part of me that was still connected to the girl in the Salem woods was also just waiting.

I had not known it was waiting. I thought it was closed.

She stood in the street outside my house in the October of 1775 and looked at me with those eyes that had not changed, not at all, not one degree, and I understood for the first time what I was. What we were. What it meant that our kind did not age and did not forget and did not, apparently, stop missing one another across a century of absence.

I had forgotten what it was to have someone who knew me. Not the woman I was playing, not the role, not Betsy Bishop of such-and-such address and standing. The woman before any of that. The girl in the rotting log with no name worth keeping yet.

She said my name. She said it the way she had always said it, as though it were the most natural thing in the world that it should be mine.

I said her name back.

Then we stood there a while longer, because some things take a moment, and we had learned by then that there was no urgency the world could arrange that was worth cutting that moment short.

She had a plan. Of course she had a plan. She told me about the war to the north and what she believed about it and what she thought our kind could do in the dark along the British encampments. She believed the Americans would do better by her people than a government across the sea. This was, I would learn, a complicated faith; but it was sincerely held, and I had never known her to hold a belief without reason.

I said I was ready.

I was ready. I had been ready for a hundred years without knowing what I was ready for.

Now I knew.