“Did you ever have one of those weird connections with someone?” The girl asked, crossing her legs and bringing her coffee to her lips. She belonged here, drenched in the hip, urban poetry and artsy society. There was something long and cool in the way she sat there, her linen skirt creasing and wrinkling down to her ankles.

I was mesmerized.

“You know,” she continued, her eyes focused out of the window, oblivious to my eyes wandering her features, “like when you both happen to glance at each other at the same time, as you reach for the same newspaper, and you just feel like, bam, some kind of weird jolt of recognition, even though you’ve never seen that person in your life?” She paused, her lips sliding back and forth over one another, evenly recoating her lips in candy pink. “Mama used to call those ‘crossovers;’ that your soul remembers the other person’s soul from a past life, but the memories of your current life get in the way.” A laugh, lighting her eyes with a kind of fire. “Mama believed a lot of strange things.”

“How long has it been?” I asked, shifting a little in my seat. There was a notepad in front of me, already flooding with the long swirls of my handwriting, next to the tape recorder. I did my best to look the part of the journalist, from the loafers, khakis, all the way up to the shiny tie. I was clean and (hopefully) unthreatening, seated across one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen in my life.

Her name was Dante.

She took a deep breath, exhaling slowly and flicking a long strand of gold back behind her ear. “A year next Thursday, since she died.”

“That long already?”

“I was about to say it feels as though it’s been an eternity.”

I shifted uncomfortably, praying I hadn’t just insulted her. I waited as her eyes glazed over, staring at the wall, seeing things no one else could see. The awkward silence spread on, grating on my smiling mask of calm. I racked my brain for something to say...

Then, lamely: “I’m very sorry.”

Dante laughed, suddenly, her voice rich and unhindered; it was a magical sound, like the peeling of bells. “Don’t look so surprised. Life goes on without her, but it’s a little harder. Besides, if I hadn’t wanted this interview, I would have turned you down.” Winking, she sipped at her coffee. “I figured I’ll have to set the record straight before Hollywood goes turning Mama into some kind of crazed alcoholic with extreme paranoia when she wasn’t.”

“So has someone bought the rights to the make her journals into a movie?”

She laughed again, the sound muffled in the depths of her coffee mug. “Of course they keep trying, but your people keep trying the hardest.” She pointed at him, sloshing her cup around precariously. “You want some kind of endearing madwoman, a crazed angel, or a possessed virgin to make a strange-but-true fictional account of my mother’s most delusional moments.”

“She really was delusional?”

“Sometimes.” The hazel of her eyes darkened with something akin to old pain, suddenly staining her youthful beauty with years. “She thought a lot of strange things and wrote them all down; her journals are the mad side of Mama, but she was a ying yang.” Making a giant circle with her hands, Dante didn’t seem to notice when her coffee spattered indelicately on the wall next to their table, running like dirty tears down the pinkish paint. “Mama used to tell me she loved my Papa with all her heart, but she was saving herself for someone else. She believed up ‘til the day she died, she’d be carried off by a vampire into eternity.” She chuckled, shaking her head. “And not just some kind of freak with a blood fetish, either; no, she wanted a real, honest-to-God, undead, immortal, turns-into-a-bat kind of vampire. She said she dreamed about him, and would recognize him the moment she saw him. She knew even what he would smell like. But, then again, she liked normal things too. She liked school, cooking, and watching TV. Audrey Hepburn movies and Shakespeare, books, movies, comic books, video games.”

Wondering, out loud: “Did she name you 'Dante' after the after the author?”

The girl frowned at that, sipping her cooling coffee before answering. “She wanted one boy and one girl. The girl she’d name Artemesia, after her favorite painter, and the boy would be Tylendal, after some character in a book she loved. When she had twins girls,” Dante shrugged, “she was totally at a loss for what to name us. We’d ‘ruined her plans,’ so to speak. It took her a whole year after we were born to come with ‘suitable’ names. We were named after two twin demon-boys in a video game she grew up playing. I am Dante, named after the good twin, and Virgil, after the bad twin. The names were well chosen though."

I jotted something into my notebook, doodling a flower next to my notes, focusing on each word she breathed. When she finished, I looked up at her from my pad with raised eyebrows. “And now, after all that, you’re going to try and convince me that your mother was not crazy?”

Dante blinked at me, like I’d woken her from a dream. She smoothed her long hands down her skirt, her hazel eyes misted with thought. “Don’t get me wrong, Mama wasn’t right. But she had her lucid moments too. I think Hollywood finally did her in. People that knew her Before say so.” She emphasized “before” like it deserved a capital B. “But that’s beside the point. Where shall we start?”

“I’d like to start with her first journal, I guess.” I pointed at the backpack full of journals on the table next to us. “And you can fill in what you know, or what you think.” The tape recorder buzzed softly, and I switched the tape over to the other side.

Dante pressed a cigarette between her lips and fished out her lighter and one of the journals. The book bulged with pasted in photos and clippings. “Well, first off, Mama was born in the late 1970s. I dunno who started the rumor that she was born in the ‘wild spring of 69,’ but it’s hogwash. She was too young to be a child of the 60s. Anyway, no one but her dead Mama knew her birthday; not even her adopted parents did.

“They named her Kelli, after her mama, and gave her August 12th, 1977 as her birthday. I reckon it was close enough to her real birthday not to matter.

“Mama grew up in a little farm town in Minnesota, raising cows. It wasn’t until her ‘eighteenth birthday’ that they told her she was adopted. Then Mama left, and never went back.”

Dante drew on a thick pair of black emo glasses, blinking at the first page in front of her. She read:

August 12th, 1995:
Today I am reborn. My parents, no... that’s not right, my adopters, informed me today, on my supposed 18th birthday, that all these last years together had been a lie. I am not who I thought I was. I have nothing but a death certificate and a name. I feel I must find her grave for my soul to be at peace.

Dante flipped a page, her eyes running over the text there. “She goes on for several pages like that, talking about how ‘empty’ she feels and how her life sucks. She leaves home on August 15th, traveling to New York to track down her mother, after her adopters finally tell her near where her mother is buried.”

November 22nd, 1995:
After months of searching, I found her. The tiny stone angel reaching to the heavens. The statue comes no higher then my knee, and it reads simply “Kelli McSharren 1941-1979.”
It is enough for me.

November 23rd, 1995:
I took a Polaroid, memorializing her into my journal for my eternity. I’ve wondered briefly at my father. Wondered if he still lived, if he knew of my mother’s death.
If he cared.
Mother rests atop the Golden Grove Hill outside of the city. When the sun rises on a clear ay across this hill, it surely earns its name, showered in glory yellows and whites of the first morning light. I can almost imagine mother here, sitting on a taller gravestone, to watch the sun rise. The dew splits the light into rainbows, and the world is a beautiful place.
It’s a beauty I’ll never really get to share with you, Mama.

Dante handed me a picture from the book as she spoke; it was dark, and colored yellow with age. It was a tiny angel, its chubby arms reaching upward, its empty stone eyes gazing into the sky. The grass grew up healthy around the grave like a green cloak. The cemetery was surreally beautiful.

“Mama would return there, when the world became too much.” Cradling her chin in the palm of her hand, she dragged at her cigarette, staring down at the hand-written pages before her. I handed her back the picture and she replaced in reverently. “She would sit on the grass and read her mama books ‘til the sun went down. She found it relaxing, I guess.”

The waitress slid by, asking if anyone wanted a refill. Dante smiled, holding out her mug and thanking her. “Anyway," she continued, once the woman was gone, "since her mama was in New York, she decided to move there as well, going back only to get her stuff. I don’t think she ever saw them again, her ‘parents’ of almost sixteen years.”

December 2nd, 1995:
The days grow colder, sweeter. There’s the exciting tang of Christmas in the air. The season is slowly spilling out onto the streets, bringing holly and red ribbons, painting the snow-white streets with greens, reds, and golds. Even the stoplights seem to be in tune with the world, tinting the snow at night with the colors of the season.
The city is much different from the rest of New York. It’s constantly moving, flowing, life streaming through every pore, every street, at any hour. I love it here, and feel no urge to return to...

“Wait just a second.” I held up one hand, halting Dante mid-sentence. She looked at me curiously, her red eyelashes batting furiously against her cheeks. “So her first journal was in 1995?”

Dante pushed her fiery curls back behind her ear. “Of course not.” She held up the notebook, the cover shinning in the low lighting. “This is journal she started the day she found out she was adopted. The others before are written by someone else. They’re normal dreams, fantasies, and emotions of a normal little girl. August 1995 was a turning point, when her metamorphosis occurred, turning her into the Mama I knew, the Mama the public knew. I’ve read all of these before,” she adjusted her glasses on her nose, “and I cannot find one scrap of mother in the old journals. There was no madness there, no delusions. She was, completely and totally, a different person.”

“But still, isn’t it relevant to her story?”

Dante shook her head, her curls bouncing over her shoulders. “No, not really. What do you want to know? About Before?”

She said it again, overemphasizing “before.” I was beginning to understand why. The myth of Kelli Corbet was not one grounded in reality. Had she been truly lucid Before? Or was there some kind of quiet seed of madness that bloomed in the stress of her life after August of 1995?

I had to know. Who was the Kelli of Before? “There are journals of Before, aren’t there?”

“I’m telling you: yes, there is something, but it was not written by my mama. That girl,” she pointed to the bag of journals, “was someone else, who died on August 12th, 1995, setting Mama on the road to what she became.

“If you want, you are welcome to borrow them and take them back to your hotel with you. As long as you remember in your notes that this was a whole other life for Mama.”

“I could?” My elated reaction excited a small laugh from Dante.

“Of course.” She pulled her other bag onto the table, sifting through the books and making a small stack on the table. “I’ll put the damned things in order, so don’t shuffle them up. The first one starts when she’s twelve or so, and the last one ends August 1995. The first one starts when her ‘parents’ give her an extra notebook, for her own use, and she begins a journal in it. Every year, they bought her a journal, and every year she’d fill it up.” There was a soft smile as she handed over one of her bags, bulging with books. I glanced into it, surprised at its weight. “Well, that’s the only thing that she took with her when she left her old life: journal writing. She never quite got that out of her system. Anyway, go on and scan them in, or whatever. Just don’t cut them up. I don’t care as much about these, but they were still Mama’s.”

Dante stood, pulling her bags with her, and tucking her glasses back into the depths of her purse.

I blinked up at her. “You’re leaving?”

“I am. You’ve got a lot to look through. You know, I’ve got all the time in the world for this. However long it takes to get the story right. Good day, Mr. Andrews. Drop me a line when you’ve gotten through all of that,” she waved a dismissive hand at the stack of notebooks.

And then she was gone, leaving the café colorless and empty.

Possibly trying to return to college for the Spring '08 semester. We'll see how that goes. I applied to this one college, and I think I'll just keep applying there til I get in. Anyway, that means yet another wasted sememster at community college...

Mina