I Think We've Been Here Before

by Suzy Krause

And now it’s time to shut the doors for good. She locks them behind her, even though, to an onlooker who knows the situation, this might seem like an absolutely ridiculous thing to do. It’s not like someone’s going to go in there and mess the place up or anything. It’s more a point of ceremony, a symbol of finality.

Hilda takes a chance and throws an arm around Alfie’s shoulders as they head back to the car together, feels her melt into the side hug, realizes she might have been wrong. Maybe, all this time, Alfie was a hugger and no one knew it.

This feels final in a way that’s hard to describe. Like standing at the top of a tall flight of stairs, knowing you’re about to fall down them.

Irene steps onto the porch as they come up the driveway: Hilda and Nora and Marlen and Iver and Alfie and an unfamiliar man—or is he unfamiliar? Irene has the feeling she’s seen him before.

“I LOVE YOU, IRENE!” Hilda is screaming from the very bottom of her stomach, and it feels wonderful, cleansing, healing. “I LOVE YOU TOO!” Irene screams. The wind sounds less frightening now, just passionate, insistent, howling along with the sisters on the porch. As if the universe itself has a message too. I love you! I love you! I love you!

Jacob admires Irene’s snowflakes. “I’ve never been able to make those,” he says to her. “I always cut them wrong and they fall apart.” “I’ll teach you,” she says. She likes this boy. He reminds her of someone, but she can’t think of who it is. “They’re easy once you get the hang of it.”

He has a strange wisp of a memory, where he is here, in this spot, with this family, but this boy is still missing, never came back. But that can’t be right, can it? He’s right there, real as anything.

It’s such a cliché, to wake up one day and realize how much you’ve taken your spouse for granted, to think of all the ways you could’ve treated them better, cherished them more, but that’s what’s on Hank’s mind right now. And it is thoroughly too late to do anything about it—anything he says would come across as wooden; it would seem like he was just trying to make himself feel better in the face of death. Next time, he thinks, I’ll do better. It’s an abstract thought; he doesn’t dwell on it.

There are even, peculiarly, presents for Jacob and Alfie and Bud. No one seems to think this is strange. Maybe they just have that much faith in Irene. She doesn’t miss a beat, even an impossible one.

“How? What are you, a prophet?” Hilda laughs. “That’s the running joke in our house.” “How does it end?” asks Ole. He’s not really asking about the book.

“Everyone dies, I guess,” says Hank. “No, actually,” says Hilda. “They don’t.”

“Okay, so you know how they say your life flashes before your eyes right before you die? Scientists have studied the brain wave patterns of dying people and collected the stories of those who’ve had near-death experiences, and they’re fairly positive, almost one hundred percent sure, that it’s true—in the moments before you die, you experience a flood of emotions and memory, like vivid hallucinations, as powerful as a drug trip but still only as reliable as a human memory can be, full of holes and problems,

An entire life condensed into a thirty-second replay that feels as real as reality.”

What if this isn’t a limited experience? What if it’s infinite, or near infinite? I was thinking about, like, when a person gets to the last thirty seconds of the replay. Would their brain know it’s only the replay? Or would the same thing happen as the first time, restarting the process? And if so, the dying person’s life would flash before their eyes again, right, and then, like a nesting doll of time and memory, it would just go on and on and on like that. So that’s what’s going on in the novel. The people experience intense déjà vu, and they sometimes experience the sensation of being able to tell the future, and sometimes they remember things that have happened before, in other, I don’t know what you’d call them, life cycles, and they re-create those things, or change them, fix them . . .” He trails off. He needs to catch his breath again.

never actually experience dying? Everyone only appears to, from the outside. But inside—inside of them, I guess you could say, billions of lifetimes fly past, like blades of grass viewed from the window of an airplane.”

“I guess death is in the eye of the beholder,”

“So to answer your question, Ole: the way the book ends is, essentially, that it starts again, and the idea is that on the next iteration, tiny things will change. Memory is imperfect, and maybe this is a feature, not a bug.

a person who was lonely will find family, a person that was lost will be found. And like erosion, the effects of all these tiny changes will eventually wear away at the rough edges of the characters’ existence, until, at last, it reveals something perfect. Maybe that’s what happens: everyone gets to live their life over and over until it’s perfect.”

story Iver’s telling about Hilda as a three-year-old. Irene has taught Jacob how to make a paper snowflake that won’t fall apart; it’s a nice distraction. He has a neat little stack next to him, snipping away as they visit.

Now she has been set free; she’s working the room, hugging everyone. Maybe even she hadn’t realized that she was a hugger until now. Hilda watches her. Is it tragic that she’s waited until the bitter end to experience this kind of joy, or beautiful that she found it in time?

My body knows what to do, and everything is going to be okay.

“I have that feeling like I’ve been here before.”

One of those bittersweet things about motherhood, how those special early memories become so precious to you and lost completely to your child.

There’s a bright flash and a crash of what sounds like thunder, but the sound is much bigger than thunder. It comes from absolutely everywhere; there is no place the sound is not. It’s in their heads and feet, traveling down their arms into their fingers and to the end of every hair follicle. It’s in the attic and the basement and the silverware. It’s in the trees the kids climbed growing up and in every single stalk of wheat in the fields. It’s in the sun and the core of the earth and it’s coming out of their mouths. The sound, in all its furious power and blinding light, turns out not to be the end. It’s the beginning of the same as last time, but better. Just the tiniest bit better.