Matching scars might not be much to build a future on, but Maggie and Johnny had earned theirs. And if scars are the reminders of the past, then the identical puckered pink circles high on the right sides of each of their chests bore witness of the hard fought battle they had waged through time and space. And Johnny and Maggie remembered all of it. The sacrifice, the sorrow, the race against time, all leading up to the moment Johnny chose Purgatory.....again. Like a movie with alternate endings, they not only knew what the world had become, but what the world had been like before, when two people, two worlds apart, had found each other and fallen in love.
No one in 1958 ever knew what happened to Johnny -- or Maggie, for that matter. Billy had gone for help, only to return to a bloody trail leading down the stairs from where Maggie had been shot and a pool of blood where Johnny had lain. And Roger Carlton, of course. He was dead, and very few grieved for him.
In the space of a few hours, the world had changed. At least a small corner of it. Billy didn’t die, and Roger did. Irene didn’t marry Roger, but many years later she married Billy. And there were some things that didn’t change. Sadly, Irene still gave birth to a stillborn baby, and she and Billy never had children of their own. Dolly Kinross still suffered, Chief Bailey still searched for answers, and the years still passed while Johnny Kinross languished in Purgatory, waiting for the day when Maggie O’Bannon would help him break free.
When a young Maggie came to live with her Great Aunt Irene and her Uncle Billy when she was orphaned at age ten, Billy commented on the coincidence that she was named Maggie and that she resembled the girl that still haunted his memory. But it had been so long ago, and it was beyond comprehension to think the two girls were one in the same. Billy, Irene, and Maggie traveled quite extensively with Billy’s work, but Maggie’s last year in high school found them back in Honeyville, back in the old family home, back where the story truly began. And then time resumed its track, Maggie found Johnny in Purgatory, and what was became what is.
After all, that which has been is now, and that which is to be has already been.
The End