When they released their embrace to step back and hold hands, Linda said "You! You!
You were in my wedding picture!"
Lauren looked back at her, quizzically. "I was? When was that? "What are you talking about?"
Linda told her about the incident where she had taken Julie's place in the wedding photo.
Once Linda told her all the details, she made an "ah-ha" face as if everything suddenly made sense. "Well, I was at your wedding. You know that, don't you?"
Linda remembered crying when Marie spoke of Lauren on the reception line. "I had a feeling you were." She suddenly remembered something else. "My daughter Hayley doesn't seem anything like that little girl who was with you that time."
"Of course, not. She became your daughter, which is like becoming a totally different person."
Linda thought about the sassy talk and Hayley's lack of interest in dance or roller skating. "And she's not anything like me either. What's up with that?"
Lauren smiled knowingly, for a split second looking like the Mona Lisa smile. "That's because your children come through you, but they are not of you."
In the same way that Cindy became Hayley, Linda suddenly remembered something she'd always wanted to ask Lauren during these lucid times. "Are you ever going to want to come back to earth?"
She twisted her lip and gazed up for a moment, as if she were deep into giving the matter some thought. "Maybe someday," she replied. "Not now, though."
"Why not now?"
Lauren shifted her weight and winced as if she were suddenly uncomfortable. "Things are going to change. It's going to get a little scary. But it will be over soon."
"Change?" Linda was able to say. "What change? And how is it going to be scary?"
A deafening sound like a foghorn at ten times the volume pounded her ears. Details of the forest, the smooth stones and Lauren began to dissolve and swirl as the noise volume increased.
Linda had been awakened from her sleep by the sound of someone calling out her name.
The noise of the foghorn changed to "Lin-da! Lin-da!" When she woke up, grounded in reality though groggy, she saw Stephen walking down the hallway outside the door. "Oh, there you are," he said, stopping when he found her in her study. "We're getting ready to go to the mall. Wanna come?"