Prom Night in Purgatory (Slow Dance in P)

~17~

A Time to Cast Away Stones





“Maggie! Maggie! Wake up, Johnny’s here!” Irene was shaking her and Maggie winced, not knowing where she was or frankly WHEN she was. She lifted her weighty lids and peered at her aunt. Aunt Irene’s neat grey chignon and eyes lined with years met her bleary gaze and she readjusted herself to 2011.

“Wh-what?” Maggie moaned, pushing her hair from her face. Her glasses hung from one ear, sliding down her nose lopsidedly before she pushed them into place. She was still wearing Johnny’s white sports coat.

“Why are you in here?” Irene wondered out loud. “When I woke up this morning you were gone. I thought you were at school. Did you come in here and lay down after I got up?” She halted and gasped, looking at the rumpled red formal Maggie was wearing under Johnny’s sport coat.

“Where did you get that dress? It looks just like a dress I used to have. I looked everywhere for that dress....” Irene fussed at Maggie, and Maggie just stared down at the red formal and then around the room in wonder. Irene was acting like they hadn’t played dress up and fallen asleep in a tumble of tulle and old memories. Had they? Reality was a bitter old lady with a switch in her hands, waiting for you to turn your back. Maggie closed her eyes and flung herself mournfully back across the bed. She wanted to howl and kick her legs, and she fought the urge to shriek in frustration.

“Maggie?” Irene questioned, worry tinging her voice. She reached out and rested her hand on Maggie’s brow. “Are you sick? You feel a little warm.”

“Yes. I think I must be.” Maggie’s voice wobbled, and she pulled a pillow over her face, hiding her despair from Irene. How many times would she have to lose him? The hole was widening and her sorrow was sucking her under. She needed Irene to leave her alone for a while. Maggie didn’t want her to see the messy display that was threatening to boil over.

“He’s downstairs. He’s seems very agitated, but I’ll just tell him you’re not feeling well, all right?” Irene turned to leave.

“Wait! Who’s agitated? Who’s downstairs?” Maggie had missed an essential part of the conversation, it seemed.

“Why, Johnny, dear. I told him you weren’t here, that you were at school. But he said you weren’t at school, that he had already been there this morning looking for you!” Irene’s voice dropped to a girlish whisper. “I told him I would come see if you were here after all.”

Maggie shot upright, flinging the pillow to the side. “I want to see him. Stall him, please?”

“Are you sure you feel well enough, dear? He scares me a little. He’s so intense! It’s like he looks right through me and doesn’t like what he sees.” Irene’s voice had faded a little at the end, and Maggie looked back at her aunt, remembering the girl in her peach prom dress, standing in the parking lot in front of The Malt with her whole life in front of her. A pang of loss surged through Maggie, and she turned and wrapped her aunt in her arms.

“Aunt Irene? I don’t want Johnny to leave. Will you please just tell him to wait. I want to see him, Aunt Irene. I need to see him. Okay?” Maggie released her aunt and stepped back, slipping the white coat from her shoulders. Surprisingly, Irene made no comment about the jacket, she seemed too stunned by the red dress.

“Irene?” Maggie waved a hand in front of her aunt’s face, jolting her from her reverie.

“Oh! Okay then. I’ll go....Maggie, you’ve got....something....is that sand? Do you have sand in your hair, Maggie!” Irene’s face wrinkled in confusion.

“Of course I don’t, Irene!” Maggie lied, and then she laughed, and then she wanted to dissolve into messy, futile tears, remembering how the sand got there. Irene shrugged, turned, and left the room. Maggie brought the jacket to her face and inhaled deeply. Johnny’s face rose up before her, wrapped in his scent. Her knees buckled, and she thought she might not be able to face the boy who waited downstairs. But her need to see him was greater than her dread that nothing had changed.

She ran up the stairs to her own room and laid the precious white jacket on her bed, shimmying out of the red dress and pulling a brush through her curls as she raced around the room. Oh yeah, that was definitely sand. She yanked on a pair of jeans and her favorite pink shirt, ran back to the bathroom and brushed her teeth twice. Did her hair smell like the reservoir? She sniffed, trying to detect anything fishy. Nothing. Good. She didn’t have time to shower. Her hair still bore some curl from the prom, but her face needed make up. Time travel had left her haggard. Maggie stared at her reflection and tried to get her bearings. She dabbed on a little of this and a little of that and tried to bring her face back to the present. She tried to keep her mind from dwelling on Johnny, just two floors below. She would see him soon enough.





He paced from one side of the room to the other, and when she came into the room he stopped, his jean clad legs spread in a belligerent stance, his arms clenched at his sides. He clasped Roger’s scrapbook in his right hand. But the expression on his face wasn’t belligerent; it was undecipherable. He walked toward Maggie and stopped a few feet in front of her. He took the book from under his arm and opened it, skipping through the pages until he found what he was looking for.

“Can you explain this to me?” His voice was so low Maggie couldn’t tell whether he was angry or not. His face was carefully blank, and Maggie reached out to take the book from his hands.

She looked down at the page he had opened to, looking into the laughing visages of Irene and her friends. She had seen that picture before. There was the picture of Johnny and Peggy. A strange lump formed in her throat as her eyes lingered on Johnny’s smiling face. Just last night, just hours before, she has kissed that mouth and danced in those arms, and here he was again with the great stone face.

And then her eyes fell on a picture that she hadn’t seen before. It was a shot of the dance floor. Couples danced in close proximity, and the effect was slightly blurred as if the cameraman had caught everyone in differing degrees of motion, everyone but the couple in the center of the shot. Maggie gasped as she recognized what she was seeing.

It was a picture of Johnny and her. They stood motionless, their hands clasped between them. Johnny was staring down at her, and her chin was lifted toward him, her eyes locked on his. Maggie couldn’t pull her eyes away from the picture, and for several hushed seconds the sounds around the room magnified tenfold: the ticking of the clock on the mantle, the chirping of birds outside, the far off sound of a passing car. And her own heart, pounding in her chest.

“I remember you, Maggie,” Johnny whispered, close to her ear, his breath tickling the hair that hung near her cheek. She raised her eyes to his and the blank, harsh expression was no longer there.

“I still don’t remember anything after the night of the rumble, but I remember you. I remember this!” He pointed at the picture of the two of them, captured forever in the image on the page. “I don’t know what to think, or how to feel...but I remember you.”

“You remember me?” Maggie held her breath, not daring to hope.

Johnny clenched his jaw, and he nodded once and then again, confirming her question. “I remember the prom and the way I felt when you walked in. How we danced and how you stole that damn Edsel. It was so funny, and I was trying not to laugh because you were scared to death.” Johnny laughed harshly, and then the laughter broke off, almost in a sob.

Maggie dropped the book and reached for his hands, mirroring the way they stood in the picture. His breath was harsh like he struggled to control his emotions, but he let her take his hands. He wouldn’t look at her though, dropping his chin into his chest as if the weight of his memories made his head too heavy to hold upright. She stared at his bowed head and struggled to keep from touching his golden hair.

“I didn’t remember anything yesterday. This morning it was all there. The memories, the dance, the feelings...everything....all of it in my head, and I don’t know what to make of it. That picture wasn’t here before.”

Maggie held onto his hands, gripping them and wishing she could explain everything and not knowing how, and not really understanding it herself.

“Maybe...maybe you didn’t remember because it hadn’t happened yet,” she pondered out loud.

“What the hell does that mean, Maggie?” His voice wasn’t angry, but pleading, almost begging her to explain.

“Do you remember what I tried to tell you?” Maggie rushed ahead, trying to make him understand. “You asked me if we had ever met before. You hadn’t met me, but I already knew you.” She forced his chin up, looking into his eyes, pleading with him to listen. His eyes roved over her face, searching.

“You said time could change its mind. Is that what this is?” Johnny looked away and grabbed the book again, flipping the pages as if his life depended on it. He found the page and slammed his hand down on it. “This is the report I filed with the police! You just disappeared! I thought of you every day, Maggie. I looked for you. Why did you leave like that?”

Maggie stared down at the missing persons report with her name on it. Her first name but no last name. This hadn’t been in the scrapbook before either. Why did Roger have a copy of this? History had been altered and here was the proof. Quickly her horror was replaced with the realization that Johnny had tried to find her. He had tried to find her! She felt suddenly euphoric and short of breath, and her head spun trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. It had been only hours since she’d fallen asleep in Johnny’s arms, and yet here she stood, decades later, staring down at a police record with her name on it.

Maggie collapsed into a chair as the room around her tipped dizzily. She felt, rather than saw, Johnny letting the book slide to the floor as he knelt beside her. This time, he was the one who forced her to look at him, bracing her face with his hands.

“You didn’t disappear, did you? You came back here. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

Maggie nodded, her eyes filling with tears, unable to speak.

Johnny looked like he might cry right along with her, and his jaw tightened again, holding back the emotion she could see mirrored in his blue eyes. “It’s the only thing that makes sense, and it makes no sense at all,” he whispered.

Maggie reached up and locked her hands around his wrists where he still held her face in his hands. He was right. None of it made sense, but it didn’t make it any less true.

“Did I remember you in....Purgatory?” he asked, his eyes still on hers, his voice still laced with feeling.

“No,” Maggie whispered. “You said I was familiar, that you felt like you knew me. But I thought it was because I looked like Irene.”

“How can that be? Purgatory came after I met you. You said I knew who I was, and I knew my family, my story, right? So why didn’t I remember you? I wouldn’t have forgotten you, Maggie. After that night, you were all I thought about. I was obsessed with you.” Johnny shook his head, incredulous.

Maggie smiled at that, a hint of pleasure tinging her cheeks at his frank confession, but her smile faded quickly as she struggled to suspend his disbelief. “You and I met in Purgatory, Johnny. That’s all I know. For you and me, Purgatory came first....1958 came after. I can’t explain it. But maybe there’s someone who can.”