Lydia was almost crying: Lawrence would be called Lars, then, and be her cousin—that is, if she was born as Tweety. She yearned to tell the small boy, to make him understand. Mentally she cried, “Oh, don’t you remember? We were lovers. You died on our trailer trip together.”

“I’m a grown-up man really,” Lars said, puffing out his chest for Tweety’s benefit.

“Children do not speak at dinner,” old man Hosentauf thundered.

“I am too grown up,” Lars boasted, gesturing wildly, and spilling his soup. Tweety giggled and ducked to avoid the heel of bread thrown by her grandfather. It landed in her mother’s soup instead, splashing, and everybody laughed.

“You’ll just get him in trouble. And Tweety too,” said a terribly familiar voice.

Lydia spun around. There stood Lawrence, exactly as she remembered him—in his late twenties, as he’d been when they first met.

“I couldn’t talk to you until you wanted to remember,” Lawrence said. He didn’t look at her, though, but stared through the window. “Fascinating, isn’t it, to see ourselves as we’ll be?” he asked.

“Forget them. We’re us,” Lydia cried. “You mean, you remembered me? How I could have forgotten you, I’ll never know.”

He wore a black opera cape and carried a fresh bouquet of roses that flashed against the snow as the window light fell against the ground.

“Oh, Lawrence—Larry,” she exclaimed; and for a moment she felt that they were still having their early affair, and she was still married to—

“Roger. You were married to Roger,” Lawrence said.

“But I’m not married now,” Lydia cried. “And we’re young again.”

“Are we? Or are we just between ages?” Lawrence asked, smiling. He handed her the flowers and said, “What will you do with them? Put them in a vase on a living room table? Don’t you understand? We’re ageless. But to be really young, we have to go back in time. We have to be born again.”

“We can stay just as we are,” she said.

“You’ll like it less and less,” he answered. “We really don’t know enough yet to stay here, without physical lives. There’s more, too. You’ve been living in your own mental world. Even I couldn’t get your notice earlier—” But he broke off; embarrassed, worried for her and ill at ease himself. He knew the look in her eyes too well, and she was growing more desirable and lovely by the minute.

“Uh, I have this lovely little hallucinatory trailer by the ocean …” she said, shrugging her shoulders, raising those arched black brows with exaggerated, humorous, but quite effective invitation.