Gabrielle Zevin - Elsewhere

Aldous Ghent eats a forkful of cake and begins to cry. "Birthday cake always depresses me," he says to no one in particular.

Everyone stops talking when Betty clinks a spoon against a champagne flute. "If you wouldn't mind indulging me, I'd like to say a few words about Liz," she says. "Liz was my granddaughter, of course. But if she hadn't come to Elsewhere, I never would have known her at all. I died before she was born.

"Liz was my granddaughter, but also a good friend. She was just a girl when she got here, but she grew into a fine woman. She liked to laugh and she loved spending time with her dogs and her friends. I never would have met my husband if Liz hadn't come into my life." Betty takes Curtis by the hand.

"On Elsewhere, we fool ourselves into thinking we know what will be just because we know the amount of time we have left. We know this, but we never really know what will be.

"We never know what will happen," Betty says, "but I believe good things happen every day. I believe good things happen even when bad things happen. And I believe on a happy day like today, we can still feel a little sad. And that's life, isn't it?" Betty raises her glass. "To Liz!"

It was a pleasant enough life, Liz thinks. Though she could not remember the specific events, she senses something wonderful happened once. And she feels good about the prospects for the next.

Looking at the babies to her rear and fore, left and right, she notices that most of them keep their eyes closed. Why do they keep their eyes closed? she wonders. Don't they know there's so much to see?

As Liz travels down the River, farther and farther away from her home, farther and farther away from Elsewhere, she has many thoughts. Indeed, there is much time for rumination when one is a baby at the start of a long journey.

There is no difference in quality between a life lived forward and a life lived backward, she thinks.

She had come to love this backward life. It was, after all, the only life she had.

Furthermore, she isn't sad to be a baby. As the wisest here know, it isn't a sad thing getting older.

On Earth, the attempt to stay young, in the face of maturity, is futile. And it isn't a sad thing growing younger, either. There was a time Liz was afraid that she would forget things, but by the time she truly began to forget, she forgot to be afraid to forget. Life is kind, the baby thinks.

The waves cradle the babies and rock them to sleep. And before long, this one succumbs, too.

She sleeps; she sleeps.

And when she sleeps, she dreams.

And when she dreams, she dreams of a girl who was lost at sea but one day found the shore.

The baby, a girl, is born at 6:24 a.m.

She weighs six pounds, ten ounces.

The mother takes the baby in her arms and asks her, "Who are you, my little one?"

And in response, this baby, who is Liz and not Liz at the same time, laughs.