The Echo Between Us

Mara Chen was used to chasing ghosts. It is not the physical type but more of the footsteps people leave behind. A neglected travel blog post, a playlist forward in the dead of the night, a half-spoken word caught in a ferry's crossing of Puget Sound. Almost meant everything to her in her whole life, or was every her world.

It was Tuesday, the first time she saw the girl.

The café had been still, rain streaking the windows like tears onto the glass. Mara stroked the countertop back and forth in rhythmic vertical strokes with the only company of the hiss of the espresso machine. Then she saw somebody standing outside in the drizzle.

She was probably in her thirties with dark bobbed hair and a navy peacoat that was too warm for spring. She didn't come in; she just looked through the window as if trying to remember something.

That is when Mara looked her in the eyes, and the girl jumped and turned away.

Mara felt some strange pressure in her chest for the rest of her shift, as though something important had escaped her notice.

Some three days later, she saw the girl again.

This time, she was seated in the back corner of the café, holding a leather notebook open. Mara came with a latte even though she hadn't ordered anything.

"I didn't mean to stare the other day," the woman said, lifting her head. Her eyes were at the darkest, most undecipherable green. "I thought you were somebody else."

Mara smiled awkwardly. It occurs to me all the time. You look familiar, too."

The woman tilted her head. "Do I?"

A pause. Mara blinked. She couldn't articulate how, but there was a certain thing about the woman's voice that grounded itself under her skin and to her bones as if it was the music she did not know she knew. A tiny scar ran across the woman's jawline, pale on her skin.

"I'm Elise," the woman said.

"Mara."

The hands touched as Elise took over the coffee. Nothing electric. It's just a hum as in the beginning of something.

Within the following couple of weeks, Elise became a regular. She always carried a notebook, which she never used to write in. Instead, she and Mara talked.

They talked about music, grief, how Elise passed the coast as a child, and how Mara lived out of a van for a year after college. Mara saw the day's long afternoons with anticipation. She recalled things she didn't believe she had chucked away: a road trip she had never embarked on, a conversation that fizzled out before ever getting started.

"Have you ever felt like you live parts of your life out of order?" Elise asked one day.

"All the time," Mara replied.

Elise smiled. That is why I returned. To check whether anything lined up again.

"Back?"

Elise just stirred her tea. "I used to live here. A long time ago. It feels... different now. But you feel the same."

Mara laughed nervously. "I'm pretty sure I've never lived anywhere else…".

Maybe not in this life," Elise said quietly.

It started with dreams.

Mara would awaken in a cold one after dream images, which faded like sugar in water—a bonfire by a lake. Elise is in a sundress, her face aglow with laughter—a vintage lock is stored within the space in the tree trunk.

Once, she dreamed of a storm and a desperate voice yelling her name.

Elise's name.

She did not tell anyone, Elise not included. There was a fragility to say it out.

Instead, she returned to places she had never been—a park in Capitol Hill with a swing set creaking gently in the breeze. A shuttered Elise mentioned a bookstore—the neighborhood garden bordered by the café where the koi pond radiated like a secret.

Every place sounded to her like someone's echo who was chasing a kind of memory she was too numb to chase.

One day, Mara turned up at the café and found Elise had left.

No note. No text. Her number disconnected.

She got out and about; she asked coworkers and posted online. Nothing. Elise seemed to have disappeared.

Mara didn't shed a tear, or at least not until later. It was a silence that was too heavy with sorrow for tears. Just that feeling again—of things lacking. Something that slips right out of sight.

She dreamed again.

Elise stood this time on a cliff ledge overlooking the sea.

"We always find each other," she said. But sometimes, one of us forgets.

Weeks passed. Mara came back to the beat of old life; nothing felt real. The colors were dimmed. Music sounded flatter. She repeatedly sees Elise's outlines in the faces she crosses.

One evening, a letter arrived then.

It was postmarked as an Astoria, Oregon letter. Inside was a picture of a cliff that Mara had never seen in her waking dream existence but recognized from her dreams.

In Elise's characteristic handwriting on the back:

I remember now. I hope you will, too.

Below that, a time. A date.

Mara almost didn't go.

However, there was some urge within her to be known.

It had been a long drive to Astoria under gray skies. The radio was leading and fading away. Two miles from the coast, her GPS lost signal. She followed instinct.

The cliff was real.

While Elise stood waiting, a scarf billowed angrily in the wind, and the waves crashed behind her.

Mara was out of the car, feeling her heart pound.

"You came," Elise said.

Mara nodded. "I don't know why."

"You always do. Every time."

They stood still, the salt air in between.

"Do you believe in past lives?" is the question. Elise asked.

"I didn't. But as for me, I presume that I do now.

Elise moved her hand around her coat until she produced a small wooden box.

Inside was a necklace. Simple. A flame-shaped pendant sculpture.

"You gave me this, said Elise. "A long time ago. I kept it every time. But I forget, but I always forget until it's too late. I think... this time, I wanted to remember earlier.

Mara reached out her fingers and touched the pendant.

And then it arrived—not a flood, a wave even—just a soft unfolding.

The fire. The lake. Elise, younger. The promises made. The tragedies that followed. The long separation. The silent return.

She began to cry.

Elise pulled her close.

They stood on the rim of the world with something with no name in hand.

Later, they sat on the hood of Mara's car and watched the stars manifesting.

"So what now?" Mara asked.

"Now? We start again. But perhaps this time, we end the story.

Mara nodded.

She felt at home for the first time in ages.