Jill
HOME AGAIN
May 4
A COUPLE OF WEEKS after Jill’s release from St. Elizabeth’s and many unpleasant legal machinations, Jill stood on the city sidewalk facing her childhood home.
It was a Saturday morning. The clear, clean creek, to her left, roared from the culvert swift and full. Brilliant yellow forsythia ranged through the landscape, bending beneath the breeze, dotting its way down the bank through Sam’s old rock garden, past Bette’s place of solace, a small roofed pavilion. The air was clean and cool, probably the last breath of coolness before summer hit—which, according to the weather report, would be around noon, when the temperature would soar and humidity move in.
Whens clutched her right hand. Manfred, who was mostly Saint Bernard, sat next to them. Elmore was only too happy to get rid of Manfred, since she shed on his ten-thousand-dollar custom-made couch, and could clear his priceless porcelain from the coffee table with an affable wag of her powerful tail.
Whens asked, “Mommy, is this the house?”
“Yes. It’s the house Uncle Brian and Aunt Megan and I grew up in. Grandma and Grandpa’s house.” It seemed funny to say this to Stevie. To Whens; she’d finally fully succumbed to calling him Whens. He had never met her parents; they had disappeared years before he was born.
“But Gram and Gramps live in Annandale.”
“They’re your daddy’s mother and father. This is where my parents lived—Grandma and Grandpa Dance.”
Steady on, she thought, staring at the house with eyes as wide as Whens’, seeing it for what it truly was: an old, neglected wreck of a gargantuan, yet stately Victorian mansion, complete with a ballroom on the second floor. Sam’s gardens engulfed the house like a sea, waves of varyingly high foliage topped with hollyhocks yellow and violet, lower eddies of mostly spent tulips frothing white and magenta; spears of pink lilies and a whole patch of orange, self-seeding bachelor buttons that had helped themselves to ever-widening territories. Vines ran riot over the porch. A climbing yellow rose blocked the windows of the north front room, obviously delighted with its house-sized trellis. Oak limbs the size of elephant legs overhung the roof. They would require surgery, preferably before the next strong breeze. The house needed a serious infusion of cash.
Halcyon House was principally green, although that was debatable, what with the paint peeling so badly. The stained-glass trim above the windows on Jill’s old tower room shone yellow, red, and blue. The window was open, just a bit; rain would have gotten onto the hardwood floor.
That was the least of her problems.
Whens tugged on her hand. “Let’s go in.”
She smiled. “Okay.”
The sidewalk leading up to the porch was frost-heaved. She remembered roller-skating here, dashing streetward but making sure not to let her skates catch on the bump. It had been five years since she had been inside—save for the episode that had landed her in St. E’s, which she did not remember—and apprehension seized her: What would be different? What would be the same?
And could she bear it?
She glanced down at Whens. She had to bear it.
“There’s a hole.”
She lifted him over the rotten wooden step. She held him on her hip as she slipped the house key from the pocket of her jeans and unlocked the door. She pushed it open, and the musty smell of pent-up years rushed out.
“It’s dark.”
Jill said, “Let’s open the blinds.”
Megan had had the front window repaired. Though Jill didn’t remember bursting through it, she had a scar on her chest from one of the shards. She was lucky not to have cut her throat.
“I’ll do it, Mommy.” Whens pulled on the cord with all his might, hand-over-hand like a seaman raising sail.
The wooden slats clacked. Sunlight brightened the multicolored spines of several thousand books on their built-in shelves. Jill unlocked the tall, wavy windows on each side of the repaired plate glass and raised them. Fresh air washed through the room.
Whens looked around. “It’s pretty. Like a storybook.”
“Yes,” she said, transported. In Whens’ voice she heard Megan’s, when she was five, skinny and antic, always laughing or dancing. Whens, despite his similar voice, was serious, almost grave, with a sense of humor too grown-up by far, and she wished for a moment that he might imbibe some of Megan’s cheerful spirit here. But even Megan was serious, now.
Megan must have dusted the eclectic mix of furniture, and washed the gilded-frame mirror over the fireplace, for everything was splendidly clean. On both sides of the fireplace, shelves overflowed with an irregular tapestry of books. Old friends, some her mother’s: international policy, the brain, DNA, and ancient Chinese poetry.
Her father’s books were more concrete. World War II. Physics. Engineering. Watson and Crick and obscure journals. But after … after …
She sighed. Say it. After Mom Left.
After Bette vanished, Sam read more novels, almost as if questing after information about the physical world was completely useless. He devoured fiction, she recalled, lying on the couch and smoking, day and night, when he wasn’t working.
“Mommy.”
“What?”
“I’m thirsty.”
Jill returned to the present. “Ha! Look at this.” She rushed toward the kitchen, pulling Whens behind her. Manfred padded along, turning her head from one side to the other, inhaling and sorting the huge house. “No problem! We’ve got everything here. Electricity! Garbage pickup! I’ve started the Washington Post! And—ta-daa”—she turned on the tap triumphantly—“water!”
Whens, unmoved, gazed at his mother and then at the sink, pondering. “We usually have water, don’t we?”
Jill smiled. “I know you take all of that for granted, sweetie, but it doesn’t happen by magic.”
A large, round oak table, painted white, anchored the kitchen. Glass-fronted cabinets, framed by dark walnut, reached to the ceiling, showing off their early-sixties contents. Green, yellow, and red Fiestaware, a Tupperware Popsicle-maker, Bette’s well-used electric coffee percolator. The backsplash was tiled with pale green tiles.
Whens frowned. “I don’t want water. I want a Slinger.”
“No Slingers. Too much sugar.”
She tried to ignore the doubleness she had come here to confront, the two lives, stretching out behind her, seemingly parallel and yet not, with that paradoxical break, its Möbius-like twist that baffled her ideas of continuity, linearity, cause and effect. Had she not gone to Dallas, what might be different here, now?
It was a good bet that Brian would have died in Vietnam. Headstrong and patriotic, he had joined the Navy, in that life, in that world, that she had run from. Had that world been completely obliterated? Did it go on, somewhere, elsewhen?
That was the timestream where her mother lived, and ran her school, there, down the broad hallway that led to the back of the house, in a huge, high-ceilinged room filled with manipulative materials whose scientific provenance was completely evident. The binomial cube, a physical, manipulative cube-puzzle showing the mass of each of the products; the little baskets holding the Exercises of Practical Life—shoe and silver polishing, table scrubbing, the contents to be laid out and used sequentially, accomplishing some purpose, some change in the environment, then put away and shelved by busy children.
Jill helped out in the school during summers. She saw herself, sitting next to one of the children, watching them think about how to make a hexagon out of isosceles triangles, or which letter to pick out of a box of letters in order to write “s-u-n.”
Memories of her family flocked around, and the present faded. She saw Brian building an Erector Set Ferris wheel on the kitchen table. Her mother frowned over a crossword puzzle while, behind her on the stove, rice burned.
Jill took a deep breath with her eyes shut, willing the memories, the visions, to be gone when she opened her eyes, so she could concentrate on her son—although, admittedly, getting a plastic tumbler from the cabinet next to the large porcelain sink, rinsing it, and filling it up did not take up much of her mind.
“It’s not cold,” he said, after taking a sip.
“I don’t think we have ice yet.” Her heart was beating hard—a paroxysmal problem, she had learned, for which she now took pills—and she felt like crying.
“Mommy, what’s wrong?”
“Oh, I’m just sad.”
“Why?”
“I miss my mom and dad.”
“I miss my daddy.”
“You little rascal!” She laughed and sprang toward him, ignoring her pounding heart.
He shrieked and fled, running through the dining room, spattering water everywhere, and then through the family room, before she scooped him up, drenching them both with the water left in his glass. “Don’t try to pull that on me. You see your father almost every day.”
“But I want to see him all the time.”
“He has to work.”
“Yes,” said Whens, as if talking to himself. “He has to work. Okay.”
Jill put him down. “Look, isn’t this a wonderful backyard? I think the first thing I’ll do is cut the grass. Then we’ll go get a swing set.”
“A swing set!” Previously, they’d had to walk to the park for such a luxury.
“With a slide.”
The lawn mower was in the shed. The boy that cut the grass used it, so it worked, and there was almost a gallon of gas in the gas can next to it. Through the years, grass-cutters had ignored the perimeter of the lawn. Opportunistic plants had advanced with enthusiasm, some of them small trees now, so that the lawn was a much smaller place than when Jill had grown up here.
Jill bent over the oil-encrusted mower to fill it with gas. Drops of sweat fell from her forehead and sizzled on the hot metal. It immediately stalled in the knee-high grass, and Jill’s shoulder soon ached from pulling the starting cord. Whens played in the creek where she could see him, and the roar of the mower isolated her in thought.
Yesterday, she had successfully defended her dissertation. Koslov, to her surprise, did not even hint at the gaffe she’d made the day of her breakdown. She had kept her two histories quite straight, never letting one pollute the other, and the other professors were polite, though not at all soft. Jill’s dissertation was titled Postwar Russia and Germany: Strategies That Led to the Postwar Russian-German Manufacturing Powerhouse. She received summa cum laude and suspected that someone had twisted Koslov’s arm to make it unanimous.
And so, she had invited her Georgetown crew, including Koslov, the World Bank crowd, and all the neighbors to her Fourth of July party. Since her release from the hospital, it seemed as if she had revved into high gear. A manic phase, her therapist warned her. You have to tell your brother and sister what’s bothering you. It’s like a pea under your mattress. It’s distorting your life. Unspoken subtext: It’s so ridiculous that once you talk about it all that energy will dissipate.
Yes, she thought, going up one straight row, then turning and making a square of the uncut grass in the middle, it’s true.
She had to tell Brian and Megan.
Right.
Bette
May 5
A TAP ON HER SHOULDER startled Bette awake. “End of the line, ma’am.”
The train conductor moved on amid the bustle of passengers retrieving luggage from overhead racks before she could ask him where here was. She unwound from her curled-up sleeping position, neck aching and hair, she was sure, a mess. An unfamiliar black patent-leather purse, wedged just below the window, yielded a brush, which Bette ran through her hair, not taking the time in the general hubbub to further survey the purse’s contents. The hair left in the hairbrush was golden blond, not brilliant white, as it had been at one time … when? Where? She had been a lot older, obviously, but that was all she could infer. If she ceased worrying about it, the information would return soon. She hoped.
But where was Sam? Wasn’t he supposed to be here, with her? They had set out together, from …
She couldn’t recall. It would come back, she was sure, but how long would that take? She examined the flow of travelers moving past her seat toward the door, looking for clues. Aside from a few businessmen, many passengers wore blue jeans, although the train was quite spiffy—even luxurious. During the 1940s, when women wore uniforms such as hers, no one save farmers wore jeans, and certainly not on trains. One man wore a fedora, slanted over his eyes, but he was the only one. A Women’s Army Corp hat lay on the empty seat next to her; she put it on, took it off, then put it on again, reflecting that perhaps, at last, she had gone completely mad. She didn’t even know what year it was. A bad sign.
Well, it happens to the best of us, she thought, as she searched under her seat. Her uncle Hank, a once-brilliant Harvard professor, ended his days collecting antique pocket handkerchiefs and picking out the embroidery, as if to free every handkerchief in the world from the subjugation of permanent ownership.
She stood and smoothed her skirt. Everyone had left the car. She saw no suitcase that might be hers.
But this is a bit worse than Uncle Hank’s situation, thought Bette, clanking down onto the metal conductor’s step with the help of his steadying hand. Uncle Hank’s madness didn’t cause him to careen through the cosmos—at least, not that she knew of. The hot, damp, familiar swelter told her the season, and the sign above the gate ahead of her proclaimed that she was at Union Station, Washington, D.C.
That was rather a relief, atop her previous relief was that everyone on the train spoke English; she would not have relished being in Russia or in Germany in various years, and this was even better; she was quite familiar with—
But no, she thought, as she stepped inside, firmly ignoring curious glances from those around her. This Union Station was glorious: glitteringly gold-leafed and beaux arts, yet very up-to-date, she supposed, since many people stood at what looked like Q kiosks, studying and touching screens. During the many years she had passed through the station, in the forties, fifties, and sixties of what she referred to, in her own mind, as World Prime, with other, always slightly differing iterations slotted into different file cabinets in her mind, the polished marble she now trod had been scuffed and dull, toward the end, with ceilings and corridors boarded over with plywood. Now, glittering shops unreeled down corridors. The lobby’s domed gold-leaf ceiling glowed high above. Gargantuan statues overlooked the human ants below.
Because she was wearing her Army uniform, circa 1945, passersby stared at her curiously, perhaps not even recognizing the provenance. Or maybe she had entered a world where a war was presently taking place, and the U.S. had been taken over by the Soviet Union, or China, and she wore an enemy’s uniform—
Oh, stop it, Bette, she thought. The people passing purposefully through or window-shopping appeared neither cowed nor deprived. Everything’s fine.
After reading a plaque commemorating the inauguration of the American Maglev System, AMS for short, and noting that its network spanned the country, she spotted a café in the north corner of the station and headed toward it thankfully.
She settled into a booth where she could observe the lobby over a mahogany partition, set her WAC hat on the table, unbuttoned her tailored jacket, and straightened the knot of her tan tie.
She ordered a double espresso and a dozen raw oysters, but did not relinquish the menu to the waitress, as the back of the menu had information about the renovation and the startling, thrilling fact that Dance and Associates had been a part of the architectural team for the renovation. Presumably, they had done the fire protection work.
Obviously, she was in a nexus.
Although Hadntz seemed to be able to negotiate timestreams, Bette could not hold many of them in her mind at the same time. Timestreams were physically real consciousness-consensus, and, until Hadntz had invented her tool for knowing about other timestreams, they had been invisible to humanity, like bacterium before the invention of the microscope, and other galaxies before the invention of the telescope. Hadntz’s Device theoretically gave humans access to other timestreams, and, because they were consensus realities, it also gave humans the power to change other timestreams.
Theoretically, of course, thought Bette, sipping sweet, scalding-hot espresso through a sugar cube.
It made her quite ill, physically, to move from one timestream to another. Maybe she had slept that off in the train. A memory teased her—a long, long tunnel—then vanished like silvery fish in a dark lake.
Insertion of oneself into another timestream changed it. The long-term physical effects of timestream jumps were unknown, and Bette felt lucky she had not ended up drooling in front of a television set in an old folks’ facility, or in Bedlam a couple hundred years ago.
Sam’s signal was music: bebop, in particular, a distant music he heard and then was able to follow, although he did not like to and did not want to.
Jill. Yes. Now Bette was remembering. The splinters—yes, really it was an appropriate word, considering—were coming together again, forming a complete, if distorted vision. When had that visit been? Where had she and Sam come from? Another timestream? This one? That had been a very brief visit, wrought with great difficulty. She remembered that much.
Now, she hoped, she was back in that same timestream, just a bit farther on. She hoped that Jill was no longer in the hospital. And no longer in—
Danger. Yes. Some dark threat. What? What?
The waitress slid a plate holding a dozen pale oysters in front of her. Their fresh, briny scent was tantalizing. One thing that she had learned in her life was that it was best to eat when food was available, because she had gone through many times, during the war, when it was not. Bette swallowed three oysters quickly, and considered motive, trying to hit on the key that would unlock the mystery of her presence here.
Hadntz had recently enhanced her invention with a genetic alteration that increased mirror neurons in the brain, which thereby increased empathy. She claimed that once male team aggression, a trait that evolved in agrarian prehistory to protect property, and the predisposition to consign outgroups to a subhuman status—which made it easier to kill and torture others—were modified, conditions for all life on earth would improve immensely.
Why did Hadntz, Bette, Sam, Wink, and by now, uncountable others, think that such modifications were morally acceptable?
The answer went back to the War. And, actually, not just the wars of the twentieth century, which had been the crucible for its tandem development with the atomic bomb, a project that Hadntz had left early on, but all wars. Anyone who had experienced polio knew for a fact that modifying humans with a vaccine was better than allowing polio to occur. Anyone who had experienced war knew that there should be a better alternative. A positive alternative, not just appeasement, which Churchill had likened to feeding a crocodile, hoping that one would be eaten last, when Chamberlain had appeased Hitler in 1938 by signing the Munich Agreement, ceding to Hitler the Sudetenland. Appeasement had not worked; Hitler continued his aggression. Living in a dictatorship, or a religious tyranny like the women accused of witchcraft, though perhaps peaceful on the surface, was not an alternative to war either. No—cessation of war could only occur in a human atmosphere of communication, universal suffrage, and universal literacy agenda-free education. Many studies—at least in some timestreams, Bette thought, looking around and wondering if this was one—had proven that the empowerment of girls and women, through education that led to jobs, was key in creating the strong economies that would short-circuit war-inducing poverty.
Neural pathways laid down early in life were potent, but alterable. Enhanced brain plasticity, an explosion of neural growth, was one important effect of being exposed to the Device, so that late-life learning could take place. Continued expansion of intellectual frontiers and wisdom were major factors contributing to a better world.
Bette’s larger mission was to make sure the Device, and its offshoots, were used to optimal positive effect. Sam, Jill, Megan, and Brian were intimately involved in the evolution and distribution of the Device, like it or not. Was she here because of love and longing for her children, or was there some sharp, underlying purpose, such as specific protection of them?
And where was Sam? They had started out from somewhere—somewhen, together …
She was quite uneasy, now that she was becoming more oriented. Something must have happened to him along the way.
She opened her black patent-leather purse and inspected the contents without taking them out, in case someone might be watching.
Seven passports. A handful of documents representing the political outcomes of various wars, strategies, and time lines. Four were in a hidden compartment: One for the United German Republic, in a time line in which Germany had not been divided, post-war. A Reisepass for Deutsche Demokratische Republik, East Germany, with a compass inscribing a circle on the cover: “We, the East Germans who have survived the war, must in penance work for the Soviet State as a Nation of Engineers.” Next, a dark green passport with a stylized eagle and five-pointed star on the cover, from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, West Germany, propped up and occupied after the war by the United States. Another for a single, recently reunited Germany, not, she hoped, of this time line, for she hoped she had arrived in the one in which Germany had never been split.
Sam had filled her in on the history of their children’s world after he left them and then finally found her in Mönchengladbach, Germany, in a slightly different time line. These documents gave her political legitimacy in several offshoots of their own World Prime. Wink had left that world in WWII. Or they had left him.
Let’s see. One passport for a Russia divested of satellite nations. Another for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics sucking surrounding countries dry. One for the United States. Also a Washington, D.C., driver’s license for 1960, a piece of cardboard with no photograph. Most were in different names.
Egad.
She snapped her purse shut. She and Sam had tried to aim for Jill with arrowing intensity, because of the threat she could not now remember. John F. Kennedy had lived to do who knew what, but that single event was accompanied by an entire fabric of past, as well as present.
The waitress leaned over her. “Another espresso?”
“Just regular. Do you happen to have a newspaper?” She hoped that she wasn’t making a terrible gaffe; she saw others here and there reading from handheld tablets that she assumed were some kind of Q, which she lacked right now.
“I saw one behind the bar.” She returned with a disorganized Washington Post and a mug of coffee.
It was May 5, 1991. The Metro section led with a pleasant article about a rapidly dropping murder rate; Style interviewed a hot movie director. Buried deep in the A section was a long piece about a new war in Africa. Plenty of jobs for Q processors of many persuasions. Finally, Bette found the rumpled front page: National and International News.
Above the fold: The temperature would soar into the eighties this afternoon, and Robert Kennedy, with the help of his brother Jack, was running for a second term … She leaned back and allowed rare relief, just for a moment. So she was in the time line Jill had wrought; the one she had so unwillingly left—she again checked today’s date—almost thirty years earlier.
Or at least one that was similar. She no longer thought of time as linear. Instead, it built on itself, it switched tracks; it jumped, it split, it flowed in currents that looped and intertwined. It grew, like a garden, seeded with differing events, philosophies, art, music. It turned back upon itself. Ultimately, one ran out of similes and models. Time was more strange, and more malleable, than she could grasp, just like consciousness itself. Whole lifetimes had flown past, hers, and those of her children, and here she was, young again, wartime-young, as if some threat from those times had reappeared. But who, how, what?
Sam, or Wink, had proposed at one time that they were the conscious components of a Q-like analogue of the M-9 Fire Director, the radical, top-secret weapon using shortwave radar that Sam and Wink had worked on in the Army. The fire director was able to follow a moving target, anticipate its future path, and calculate missile speed and direction. It had changed the course of WWII.
The “missiles” of avarice, greed, ignorance, poverty, and ill health were still among them, and still required eradication, from what she could glean from the Post. Perhaps their particular model of the M-9, the core personalities of Bette, Hadntz, Wink, Jill, and even, perhaps, Brian and Megan, had been called forth by some circumstances and were being assembled into a new, advanced version of the M-9, ready to calculate the trajectories of disease, ignorance, poverty, disaster, and fire the appropriate missile to explode them before they hit their target. Maybe that’s why she was wearing a war uniform, eh? She was Bette-of-the-war again.
She opened her purse. She hoped that Past Bette, or whoever had booted her into this time line with so many disparate passports, as if they had little control over where she would end up, had given her some folding cash.
In the bottom of the purse she found sundry change and felt a moment’s panic. If she had a lot of money for the 1940s, when a cup of coffee cost about a dime, she might not be able to pay the unbelievable seventeen-dollar bill that lay on the table.
But in a green alligator-skin wallet she found five hundred dollar bills, and a sheaf of smaller bills. Relief. In the other compartment, she found an assortment of marks, rubles, something called euros, and a plastic card that said American Express. She did have a vague memory of something called a credit card, in a year future to her Army self: 1959. Sears and Roebuck, the only credit card she and Sam had owned. Good. She did have a sort of working memory. Physical artifacts triggered memories. She definitely needed a few more flashes of illumination.
Happily, she also had a pack of Chesterfields and got one out, noticed there was no ashtray on the table, and then felt the disapproving looks of the people in the table next to her, and then the SMOKE FREE signs all over the damned place. She put it away.
She left nineteen dollars on the table and stepped out into the vast atrium, heading for the light-streaming rectangles of the front doors.
She stepped into the bright sunlight of early May: red and yellow tulips arrayed in front of the Capitol, newly leaved trees, a lovely Washington day. Though hot. Pulling out another cigarette, she lit it, and wanted to stroll, relax, let memories unfold. She couldn’t, though. She was uneasy, and her instincts were well honed and reliable.
Mini cars, tiny as in England during the war, and packs of bicycles coursed down broad avenues. A Free Montessori School in a shop front replaced the florist she recalled. Wonderful!
Then a sign for a Metro stop reminded her of the Underground, and it all came back.
She and Sam had been at a party in London—in another timestream, of course, but one more analogous in time, to this present.
Wink had surprised them, moving through tuxedoed and ball-gowned guests with his natural social ease, despite the fact that he wore an Army uniform, circa 1944.
Like the one that she now wore.
* * *
“I thought you were dead!” Sam said, as Wink grabbed them and pulled them in his wake, parting the crowd on their way out.
“Glad to see you too,” Wink replied, grinning over his shoulder. “Let’s move.”
Bette had no idea how long the tunnel trip beneath the Atlantic lasted. She recalled that Wink said something about “leaving a marker,” which meant their physical presence in this time line, which would guide them back without his help. They came up out of the Metro—a Metro with this logo—and visited Jill.
They had then returned to England, to lure away some unknown enemy of Jill’s—signified to Wink as perhaps his roaring tornado or the whistling of a buzz bomb. But time lines had snarled, as wires or strings, left to their own devices in dark drawers gleefully tied themselves in knots. She and Sam were together, and then separated, in one of the 1944s—“Where it all began,” Wink had said, in the moment before the blast, as if at that point there was some single sturdy thread with which they could pull themselves, dragging their heavy histories, hand over hand, to safety.
She did not recall seeing Wink again after that flashing moment in the pub. She only remembered Sam’s muscular grasp, pulling her from the toppling doorway, running to the Underground, shoving her back on the train with shouted directions to here, which she had somehow remembered, with her trained spy-brain, all the tortuous leaps and changes until she was back beneath the Atlantic, and he had reentered the smoke-filled maze of rubble to find Wink.
What a mess. Was this snarl deliberate sabotage? Definitely a possibility. Maybe someone had followed them from Jill’s hospital room. That had, actually, been Wink’s hope.
But who?
She stopped walking and looked around. She had apparently walked several blocks while musing, and was in a familiar spot.
Al’s Grocery. Yes, she had definitely been here before. The kids used to ride their bikes here to pick up milk or bread for her, or trade in pop bottles on their way home from school and get candy bars (Brian and Megan) or comic books (Jill). She knew Al the grocer. Or, she had known him.
Wispy shadows of new-leaved branches moved gently across the sidewalk. Al’s front door was propped open with a crate that held bouquets of iris, purple sheaves with yellow hearts, each five dollars.
She pushed her hands into her pockets, felt the small, familiar pistol she always carried, and remembered more. She and Sam were working together—yes! Still! She would never think of Sam as being gone! They were distributing the Device among the timestreams in various ways, using different mediums and different methods, always hoping to create that critical point where they could safely rejoin the lives of their children. Their work was not easy. It was war work, dangerous and risky. It required a lot of preparation and calculation. It did not always work. It hardly ever went as they expected.
Sam had found her, ten years earlier. He had left their grown children with no plan, no notice, depressed and discouraged because she had been unable to contact him for so long, and found her—or she had found him, perhaps—in Mönchengladbach, where they had once met during the War, in the remnants of that Biergarten. Place mattered deeply to the human mind. It had called both of them—she in her red dress, he wrapped in desolate loneliness.
Where was Sam? She needed to get back to him—help him—
She was suddenly aware of someone observing her, as a target. It was a very familiar sensation, for a spy. She was certainly easy to spot. Had someone been on the train with her, loitered outside the oyster bar? That short man, wearing a—homburg? how curious!—crossing a block behind her against the light?
Her environs sharpened, snapped into her mind with the certainty of a well-drawn map.
She entered the grocery store. Her low military heels clipped sharply on wide floorboards. An elderly black man, wearing a blood-smeared white apron and mopping the floor, looked up with recognition and nodded, concealing the surprise he must have felt on seeing Bette in uniform, and looking so young and fit. Al had changed; he was heavier, and his hair was grizzled with gray. She nodded at him, glanced behind herself and back to him in mute appeal for help, and ducked behind the butcher counter at the rear of the store, removing her shoes. She slipped through a door into the storage room.
The bells rang again. She heard three running steps, a man’s shout, the clang of an overturned bucket, and a splash. A heavy thud, shouted curses, and Al’s, “Sorry, mister— Hey, no call for that kind of language—”
Shoes in hand, she ran down a dark hallway and left by the screen door in the back, darting through a maze of back alleys until delivery trucks gave way to backyards and then backyards merged into a small wood mazed with narrow, forking pathways. The ground was cool beneath her feet; she yanked open the buttons on her jacket as she ran, toward the one place of safety, the one place she probably should not go.
A narrow verge of bluebells ran down to a creek, and bowed beneath a gust of spring wind as she passed them. She stumbled down to the creek, wincing as her feet landed on sharp rocks, and waded toward a viaduct tunnel. Traffic rumbled overhead. She splashed through the head-high concrete pipe toward the hazy circle of light at the end, cursing Hadntz and her Device and the whole mess of “nexes” and “splintering” and other aberrations of human consciousness and its previous, comfortable ordering of the phenomenon of time. About to emerge into the circle of light, she looked up, stepped on a slippery rock, and fell to her knees.
She remained in the cool, clean creek stream, inside the dark tunnel, and her heart melted. There was no other word for it.
A little boy squatted at the creek’s edge, about ten yards from her, poking something with a stout stick. He was a towhead, like her own kids had been. He looked up with Sam’s eyes, over glasses that had slipped down his nose, and smiled at her. She smiled back and put one finger to her lips. Up the hill, in the backyard of their beloved, dilapidated mansion, her daughter Jill, unmistakable in her determined gait, pushed a lawn mower, her mouth moving, frowning, muttering to herself, immersed, Bette suddenly knew, in her own past madness, her hospitalization, which Bette’s own actions had visited upon her. Even from this distance, Jill looked older. She was no longer thin as a stick, but mature and rounded. She even moved like an older woman with a few aches and pains, rather than the limber tomboy she had once been.
Bette almost rushed up the hill to gather Jill to her, hug her, and dance with joy. But she could not. She could not reveal her presence to her children until she knew more.
The dark tunnel contracted. Bette, who had learned and left behind countless maps, had no maps for this, none at all. It had been so, so long since she had seen Jill. Her chest spasmed in sobs. She tried to hold them in, but they echoed through the tunnel like the cries of a wounded animal. Jill could not hear over the lawn mower, anyway.
Hugging herself, ignoring the tears running down her face, Bette retreated inside the viaduct to wait until dark. The boy seemed to forget her, and dropped to his knees to grab a wriggling creature. But then he looked straight at her, smiled brilliantly, and gently put the creature back into the creek.
Suddenly, Bette knew why she was here.