I was held by the state for about a month before I was put into foster care. I remember meeting with the social worker the day before my placement. “So when am I going to meet my mom?” I remember asking.

I was put with a foster family near Shepherdstown, West Virginia. They had two regular kids and two other foster kids. They watched a lot of TV in that house. Both parents smoked constantly. I can’t separate those days from the smell and the smolder of two lit cigarettes, and it gives me a sick feeling when I think of it.

I don’t remember a dinner when we sat around the table. I don’t remember a meal without the TV on. One of the foster kids, Trevor, was violent and prone to running away, so I was left mostly alone unless I got in the way during one of the severe storms, which I did a few times and paid a steep price for it.

It was strange living two such different childhoods back-to-back like that. My love for my old family and the pain of missing them was bound up close, and that was almost harder to take than the new people. With the new people at least, I didn’t have to love anybody or be obligated to them. They weren’t kind enough to require anything from me, and their unkindness I tried to leave unanswered. I was free of affection, living in my own world and doing things myself. I don’t think I caused anybody too much trouble. I remember getting a look at my file later, during one of my periodic meetings with the social worker when I was about fifteen. “Attachment disorder” it said in big, sharp print at the top.

Sometimes I used to lie in bed at night and listen to some sports event on the radio pretty loud, though I could still hear the parents fight. I would think about Molly and my old family from before and wonder what they were doing at that moment. Sometimes when I missed them worst I thought, What have I done? But then when I got a little older and I didn’t need a mother quite as badly, I started to think about Sophia again. It was the thought of her that kept me moving forward.

I was awkward in that body because it grew faster and bigger than my other bodies. I was not fast or especially coordinated, as I had been in my previous body, but I was strong, at least. The foster dad was no more than five and a half feet tall, and my size didn’t make him like me any more.

I spent my time carving animals out of wood and reading books at the library and thinking about how I was going to find Sophia. I kept most of the animals hidden, but the foster mother once saw me putting the finishing touches on a goose. She looked it over carefully. “I’d say that’s good enough to put in a museum,” she told me, not like that was necessarily a good thing.

We went to a pretty dismal public school, but I had a few good teachers. I was obviously a capable student, so some good-hearted educator got it into his head that I was “gifted.” They had me sit in a classroom by myself while everyone else was at recess and take one of those standardized tests where you fill in the bubbles with a pencil. I remember leaving every other question blank.

I had learned long ago that it was a dicey prospect to stand out very far. There was that one disastrous time in the early forties when my parents had my IQ tested. That was lesson enough. Needless to say, you’ve got to have a large and unusual mental capacity to remember a thousand years of largely insignificant history.

As soon as I got old enough I started to look for Sophia. I had some information to work with this time. I knew she must have died in late 1985 or early 1986, and I had seen her and talked to her in hospice close enough to her death to feel hopeful I had left a few influential ideas in her mind. I felt confident, almost by intuition, that she would come back somewhere nearby. She’d done it once before; I prayed she’d do it again.

My great stroke of luck came one afternoon at a mall in Tysons Corner when I was fifteen. I saw the girl, now called Marnie, at one of those nearly extinct photo booths just inside the entrance. It took me a couple of minutes to place her. Of course I didn’t know her as Marnie at the time. I recognized her from the church in Fairfax in the early nineteen seventies. Her peaked eyebrows were what helped me out. She had the kind of eyes that gave you shit and wanted to trust you at the same time. She had been the old woman sitting with Sophia, Sophia’s mother. She must have lived as long as her daughter. They had been close, I could see, and something about their way of relating gave me a strong conviction that they would come back close together.

You shouldn’t try to control these things, I remembered Ben saying, as I followed Marnie from Tysons Corner. I followed her to the lobby of a building with a lot of doctors’ and dentists’ offices, where she met up with her mother and went down into a parking garage. I saw them get into a car together and drive off. I got the license plate number, and that’s how I found my way to Hopewood, Virginia.

The first time I saw Sophia in her newest form was the following Saturday. That was a day worth remembering. I was nervous on the bus ride down there. You never know what you are going to find or if you’ll find anyone at all. I went to Marnie’s address in the morning and walked nervously up and down the block, not sure what my next move should be. And then I saw her. She was walking along the sidewalk toward me. It was pretty stunning. I can’t really describe the way I felt. It was a lush spring day, and the sun was washing off her loose, light-colored hair as she bounced along the pretty sidewalk. She was wearing cutoff shorts and flip-flops and a green T-shirt. She was so young and so fresh-looking, after last seeing her old and dying in hospice. Her legs were long and strong and suntanned and skinny like a girl’s.

That’s a memory from my present life, just like anybody could have, but it’s already been cataloged among my very best. When I think of it, I see her walking toward me in slow motion with a soundtrack in the background. The song I always think of is “Here Comes the Sun.”

I saw such familiar things about her. The way she tilted her head when she laughed. Her wiry, capable hands. The crook of her elbows, the top of her ear poking through her long hair. She had a dark little freckle to the side of her chin.

I remember the feeling so well. This is the beginning of something big. This is our time.

I was kind of shattered in her presence, I realized. As happy as I was to see her, I was scared to talk to her for fear of beginning wrong. I was a stranger again. She’d be harder to approach, more suspicious this time, if anything. She was too pretty to presume upon. The life I was living was almost completely without love, and I was cut off and out of practice. I felt uncertain about being able to make her love me again.

But my hopefulness was the biggest thing. She was young, and so was I. I knew what she looked like; I knew where she lived. She was back on my grid, and she wasn’t married to my brother or anyone else. This was the life we could finally, I hoped, spend together if I could just handle it right.

Sophia turned up Marnie’s walk as I stood there stupidly. Marnie opened the front door, and I overheard Marnie’s voice. “Hey, who’s the guy?”

“What guy?”

“Across the street.”

By the time she snuck a look back, I had turned and begun to walk the other way.

“I have no idea,” Sophia said.

“Too bad,” Marnie said. “He was very cute.”

My heart soared to have any little thing. I was lucky to be cute, because I think I was pretty ugly in my last couple of lives.

But I knew I would have to be careful. This was the life for which I had sacrificed everything, and I didn’t want to blow it. I was so used to getting a clean slate from life to life, a kind of do-over for any major mistakes I made. But inside of this life Sophia’s memory would be just as good as mine. There were no do-overs. The whole thing felt fragile to me, and I was full of self-doubt. I didn’t want her to think I was a madman or a stalker. Looking back, I wish I’d taken my own advice more to heart.

I visited her two more times in Hopewood over the next two years without getting up the courage to say a word to her. Once I saw her planting black-eyed Susans in her front lawn. Once I saw her and her sister, Dana, in a coffee shop on Coe Street. I remember being struck by the look of her and her sister together, Lucy’s sweet eagerness contrasted with Dana’s native jumpiness. Dana was familiar to me, probably from an old life but also because she had the ragged look of a deeply agitated soul. I recognized her as the kind that took her agitation from one life to the next, wreaking havoc as she went. I’m sure she tortured the people who loved her, made them worry about where they’d gone wrong, when probably they couldn’t have made any difference one way or the other.

I waited until I was seventeen to make my move. I didn’t want to cause any big trouble in leaving Shepherdstown. I wasn’t worried about the foster family missing me so much as I was worried about causing headaches for my caseworker. I moved to Hopewood, rented myself a tiny apartment over an Indian restaurant, and entered Hopewood High School in Sophia’s class.