A Bridge of Years (47 page)

He
climbed into the car and drove back toward Belltower.

To
the hollow central mystery of his life now: Joyce.

He
found her on the Post Road, hiking to the little grocery up by the
highway.

He
stopped the car and opened the passenger door for her. She climbed
inside.

By
Tom's calculation she had turned fifty in February of this year.
She'd gained some weight, gained some lines, gained some gray. She
wore a pair of faded jeans a little too tight around her thighs; a
plain yellow sweatshirt; sneakers for the long hike up the road. The
marks of time, Tom thought. Her voice was throaty and pitched lower
than he remembered it; maybe time or maybe some hard living had done
that. Her eyes suggested the latter.

She
looked at him cautiously. "I wasn't sure you'd be back."

"Neither
was I."

"Still
planning on leaving town?"

He
nodded.

"I
was hoping we could talk." "We can talk," Tom said.

"You
haven't been around much. Well, hell. It must be a shock, seeing me
like this."

It
was true, but it sounded terrible. He told her she looked fine. She
said, "I look my age, for better or worse. Tom, I lived those
twenty-seven years. I know what to expect when I look in the mirror.
You woke up expecting something else."

"You
left," he said. "Left before I had a chance to say
goodbye."

"I
left as soon as I knew you'd be all right. You want to know how it
went?" She settled into the upholstery and stared into the blue
September sky. "I left because I didn't trust the connection
between us. I left because I didn't want to be a freak of nature,
here—or make you into one, there. I left because I was scared and I
wanted to go home.

"I
left because Ben told me the tunnel would be fixed and the choice I
made would have to be the final choice. So— back to Manhattan, back
to 1962. You always think you can start again, but it turns out you
can't. Lawrence was dead. That changed things. And I'd been
here,
I'd
had a look at the future. Even just a tiny look, it leaves you
different. For instance, you remember Jerry Soderman? Wrote
books nobody would publish? He did okay as a trade editor, actually
got into print in the seventies—literary novels hardly anybody
read, but he was real proud of them. Couple of months after I got
back, Jerry tells me he's gay, he might as well be frank about it.
Fine, but the only thought I had was, Hey, Jerry, come 1976 or so you
better be careful what you do. I actually phoned him around then,
hadn't talked to him for years. I said, Jerry, there's a disease
going around, here's how to protect yourself. He said no there's
not and how would
you
know?
Anyhow . . . Jerry died a couple of years back." I m sorry, Tom
said.

"It's
not your fault, not his fault, not my fault. The point is, I couldn't
leave behind what happened with you and me and this place. I tried! I
really did. I tried all the good ways of forgetting. And I lived a
life. I was married for five years. Nice guy, bad marriage. I did
some professional backup vocals, but that was a bad time ...
I
drank for a while, which kind of screwed up my voice. And, you know,
I marched for civil rights and I marched against the war and I
marched for clean air. When things leveled out I took a secretarial
job at a law firm downtown. Nine to five, steady paycheck, annual
vacation, and I'd be there today if I hadn't quit and bought a ticket
west. It's amazing: for the longest time I promised myself I wouldn't
do it. What was done here was finished. I'd left; I'd made my
decision. But I remembered the date on the newspaper I read in your
back yard. Every August, I marked the anniversary, if you can call it
that. Then, for the last couple of years, I started watching
calendars the way you might watch a clock. Watching that date crawl
closer. On New Year's Eve last winter I sat home by myself, one
lonely lady approaching the half-century mark. I broke open a bottle
of champagne and at midnight I said fuck it, I'm going.

"Bought
plane tickets six months in advance. Gave notice. I don't know what I
hoped or expected to find, but I wanted it real bad. Well, the flight
was delayed. I missed a connection at O'Hare and had to wait
overnight in the airport. When I got to Seattle it was already
morning; the newspaper, the one I remembered, was sitting in the
boxes staring at me. I rented a car and drove too fast down the
coast. Blew out a tire and took a long time changing it. Then I got
to Belltower and couldn't find the house. Couldn't remember the name
of the road. I guess I thought there'd be signs posted:
this
way to the time machine
.'
I asked at a couple of gas stations, looked at a map until I thought
my eyes would pop out of my head. Finally I stopped at a little
all-night restaurant for coffee and when the waitress came I
asked her if she knew anybody named Tom Winter or Cathy Simmons and
she said no but there was a Peggy Simmons out along the Post Road and
didn't she have a granddaughter named Cathy? I gave her a twenty and
came roaring out here. Caught the bad guy in my headlights and I
couldn't help myself, Tom: after all those years he still looked like
death. I remembered Lawrence lying in a cheap coffin in some
funeral parlor in Brooklyn, where his parents lived, and it
still hurt, all these years later. So I turned the wheel. I was
crying when I hit him." "Saved my life," Tom said.

"Saved
your life and drove on down the road and checked into a hotel room
and sat on the bed shaking until noon the next day. By which time my
younger self had gone home."

"Then
you came back," Tom said.

"Scared
hell out of Doug and Cathy. Ben didn't seem too surprised, though."

"You
still wanted something."

"I
don't know what I wanted. I think I wanted to look at you. Just look.
Does that make any sense? For most of thirty years I'd been thinking
about you. What we were. What we might have been. Whether I should
love you or hate you for all this."

He
heard the weariness in her voice. "Any conclusions?" "No
conclusions. Just memory in the flesh. I'm sorry if I freaked you
out."

"I'm
the one who should apologize."

He
pulled into the lot in back of the grocery store and parked where a
patch of sun came shining through a stand of tall pines. Tom decided
this woman was Joyce, unmistakably Joyce despite all the changes;
that he had walked into one more miracle, as pitiless and strange as
the others.

She
squinted at him through a bar of sunlight, smiling. "Catherine
said there's a sale on seed packets here. It's too late for a garden,
obviously, but the seeds stay good if you keep them in a
refrigerator."

"Seeds
for Ben to plant? He talked about a garden."

"For
me to plant. I might be staying here. Ben offered me a job." She
paused.
"His
job."

Tom
turned off the engine, looked at her blankly. "I don't get it."

"He's
going home. I think he deserves it, don't you? He offered me as a
replacement. His employers agreed."

He
considered it a moment. "You want this?"

"I
think I do. Ben says it's lonely work. Maybe I need some lonely work
for a while."

"How
long a while?"

"Eight
years. Then the terminal's closed for good. There won't be anything
in the basement but Gyproc walls. Weird thought, isn't it?"

Eight
years, Tom thought. 1997. Just shy of the millennium.

"I
can do eight years," she said. "I can hack that."

"What
then? They pension you off?"

"They
rebuild me. They make me young." She shook her head: "No,
not young. That's the wrong word. They make my body young. But I'll
be nearly sixty, no matter what I look like. That might be hard to
deal with. My theory is that it shouldn't matter. On the inside
you're not old or young, you're just
yourself,
right?
I won't be a callow youth but I won't be something monstrous, either.
At least that's what I believe."

She
had been Joyce, would be Joyce, was Joyce now. "I don't think
you have anything to worry about." "It's funny," she
said. "We were together for what—ten weeks, eleven weeks? It's
funny how a couple of months can put such a spin on a whole life. Now
I'm old, you're young. In a few years it'll be the other way around."

He
took her hand. He pictured himself coming back here in seven years'
time, knocking on the door, Joyce answering—

She
put a finger on his lips. "Don't talk about it. Live your life.
See what happens."

So
he helped her with the shopping and he drove her home.

During
the ride she asked Tom what he meant to do now and he told her more
or less what he'd told Tony and Barbara: head east, live on the
house money for a while, sort himself out.

He
added, "I keep thinking about what Barbara's doing. I can't see
myself carrying a picket sign around some toxic waste dump. But maybe
I should, I don't know. I think about what Ben said, that the future
is always unpredictable. Maybe we don't have to end up with the kind
of world that created, you know,
him—"

"Billy,"
Joyce said. "Ben said his name was Billy."

"Maybe
we tan uncreate Billy." Tom pulled into the gravel driveway of
this plain house, ugly but well maintained, this lonely house up
along the Post Road. "But that's a paradox, isn't it? If Billy
doesn't exist, where did he come from?"

"Wherever
ghosts come from," Joyce said.

"Hard
to believe a ghost could be that dangerous."

"Ghosts
are always dangerous. You should have figured that out."

She
touched his cheek with her hand, then opened the door and stepped
outside. Tom made himself smile. He wanted her to remember him
smiling.

Driving
east, he discovered a package of seeds in the passenger seat
where it must have fallen from her shopping: morning glories,
Heavenly Blue.

Billy
remembered a sense of upward motion, of expansion, as if he were
being drawn into a vacuum. The motion surrounded him, became a
place, incomprehensibly large, a blue vastness like the sky. And then
it
was
the
sky.

A
blue sky generous over a dry landscape, powder-white hills in the far
distance and in the foreground a farm. Water arced up from a thousand
sprinkler-heads, made rainbows over miles of kale and new green wheat
and luxurious arbors of grapes.

Ohio!

Billy
was astonished.

He
stood on a dusty road in civilian clothes. His body wasn't broken. No
more pain, no more fear.

A
road in Ohio inside a monster inside a tunnel inside time.

He
couldn't make sense of this hierarchy of impossibilities. He had been
carried here by wish or accident, perhaps by some being altogether
timeless, human or not human or human in one of its aspects or
all humanity collated together at the end of duration—he didn't
know; it didn't matter. He wondered what he would do without his
armor, but the thought was less terrifying than it should have been.
Maybe he didn't need the armor. He reached under his rough-woven
cotton shirt and touched the place where the lancet had entered
his skin; but the hole was seamlessly healed.

Billy
walked toward the farm until the common buildings loomed ahead of him
and he distinguished two figures at the main gate. Now he hurried
forward, recognizing the bearded man: Nathan, his father; and the
woman beside him was Maria, his mother, who had died of cancer a
month after Billy was born; he recognized her from her photographs.

He
stood before Nathan, who was as tall as Billy remembered him.
Billy said, "What is this place?" And Nathan answered,
"This is where we begin again." Then he opened his arms and
Billy ran forward.