In War Times (55 page)

S
AM AND JILL
returned to Washington to a season of late fall. While on their way back, the dates had gradually adjusted themselves, just as Sam was so desperately trying to hold on to them.

By the time they got to Virginia, they were in the same year they had been in when they left. But the news was much different. Robert Kennedy was president, and JFK was still alive, a globetrotting philanderer.

Sam had a strange, strong sense of having lived through this past, although he recalled the other past.

“Do you remember, Jill?” he asked.

“I remember everything.” She sat quietly in the car, her head bandaged, one arm out the window, staring at the streets they passed as if to drink them in.

Once they got into D.C. there was no sign of the highway construction that had threatened obliteration of whole neighborhoods. There were other subtle differences everywhere, which became more and more apparent. A new office building on the corner of 14th and K. The old YMCA down the block had been replaced too. Their street, when they turned onto it, was much more well-kept than when they’d left. The Kelly’s house had been remodeled; the place where the Wentworth’s house had been was now a construction site. All of this was new.

“I’m afraid,” said Jill, as they drove up to the house.

“Me too, honey.”

Brian and Megan had just gotten home from school and were snacking in the kitchen. Brian was in his first year at Catholic University, in an engineering curriculum. Doug was there too; he was going to Howard.

Sam knew these things. He also knew that this was not the way things had been. He was so suffused with dread that he could barely bring himself to say hello.

“Hi, Mr. Dance,” Doug said. “So is Jill going to transfer to Texas, or stay at American?”

“I think I’ll stay here,” Jill said. She stood in the center of the kitchen, looking lost.

“What happened to you?” asked Megan.

“Little car accident,” said Jill. “I was driving.”

“Is that how you got that clunker?” asked Brian, looking out the window. “A little accident? What happened to the car, Jill? Sounds like you totaled it.”

Sam and Jill looked at each other. It was as Bette had said. It had all healed over.

But he and Jill were the scars.

He searched the faces of his two younger children to find some clue, but he knew already. Had known since Texas, when Leonard had told him the plane was gone.

Bette was not here.

None of her cookbooks were on the shelf in the kitchen; there was no open crossword puzzle book on the table. Sam knew that if he were to go upstairs to their bedroom, none of her clothes would be in the closet.

And that she had been gone since 1962.

Jill let out a scream and ran up the stairs to her room; Sam heard her sobbing upstairs.

“What’s with her?” asked Brian. “The accident?”

“She’s pretty tired.” Sam pulled on a jacket and went out to the garden.

It was cold, with the nip of winter in the air, and getting dark. The streetlights over the viaduct were on. A few leaves clung to the trees. Their empty branches creaked back and forth in the rising wind.

As he gazed down at Bette’s koi—at least they’re here, he thought—grazing one another in languid tracings through the water, he wondered:
Where was that life, now? Where had it gone
?

Out of his emptiness rose a hoarse cry, which burst forth and was swallowed by the gusting wind, which blew away the last clinging leaves of fall with a sudden, powerful roar.

S
AM CONTINUED WORKING
, in what he called The After, when everything was so different, but only to him and to Jill.

Brian and Megan had grown up in a world free of the threat of nuclear war, due to the Munich Disarmament Treaty negotiated by Khrushchev and Kennedy in 1964. Like millions of other children, they recalled playing with exciting space toys they got in their boxes of Wheaties and Captain Crunch, which led to an expansion of interest in science education, which the country had money to fuel.

Toys made of HD10.

After the assassination attempt, Kennedy had more political capital, which he used to the fullest. The Civil Rights Bill he’d proposed in June of 1963 and which was being debated in Congress when he went to Dallas. The CIA was, as he had threatened, “broken into a thousand pieces.” He stepped down the Vietnam conflict, and left the area, which had never been an independent country, to work out its own fate.

The Dance family remembered Hawaii as an idyllic time, the time before Bette flew off to Germany, in 1963, on one of her work weeks and did not return.

Her body was never found, which gave Sam a little hope, but not much. They never had a funeral, leaving the neighbors to speculate that she hadn’t died, just run off with another man. But neighbors came and went with increasing speed as the years passed.

Sam’s garden flourished. He found a jazz club in Georgetown that welcomed old-timers at a jam session Sunday afternoons, but he never met anyone of Wink’s caliber or fire. He took pleasure in technological advances, but felt stranded, marooned. His children urged him to date, but he preferred to read, to travel, to consult.

Jill’s bullet scrape left a scar on her forehead. She refused to have it removed. She remembered what had happened, but didn’t want to talk about it; much of it came out in the alternate worlds of her comic book,
Gypsy Myra
, which became a commercial success. Brian and Megan were left with shadowy memories of the strange game; disturbing dreams, but not much else.

Jill blamed herself for her mother’s disappearance, as much as Sam tried to convince her that it was not her fault.

It was, in fact, his.

He was not interested in trying to recreate the Hadntz Device. It seemed unlikely beyond words that he could use it to find Bette. And if he did find her, what would that shatter? At times, he was angry that she had not tried to return—but maybe she had. Wherever she was, she probably knew more than he did. Maybe she knew that if she returned, something huge would go askew. But if only she could gently return…walk in the door one day and say, like Desi Arnaz, “Honey, I’m home.”

To Sam, Bette was a casualty of war—missing, but not declared dead. He assumed the emotional stance of Wang Chien, the ninth-century Chinese poet from the book Bette had left him when she had disappeared in Germany so long ago. In his poem titled “On Hearing That His Friend Was Coming Back From the War”:

Yet I never weary of watching for you on the road.

Each day I go out at the City Gate

With a flask of wine, lest you should come thirsty.

Oh, that I could shrink the surface of the World,

So that suddenly I might find you standing at my side.

To Sam’s relief, Jill continued to study political science, got internships and a series of short, contracted jobs in Washington, and was starting on her doctorate. She eventually married Elmore, who was now a lawyer involved with social issues. They still lived in Halcyon House, but were renovating a run-down town house they’d bought for peanuts on M Street at the end of Key Bridge, where they planned to open a bookstore downstairs and live upstairs. It seemed like they’d never be finished working on it, though.

Brian joined the Peace Corps, went to Africa, became an engineer, and married a woman he met there. They now had a little girl. Brian and Doug, also an engineer, formed a small company that was struggling, but had promise.

Megan had a research fellowship in the field of biological physics.

The United Nations actually functioned. Germany had been reunited in 1972, when international communism relinquished its World War II holdings, convinced that a free market would create more wealth than its former system. The Internet, the seed of which Sam had inspected early in the decade, quickly flourished once released from military control.

The ephemeral nature of time was, for Sam, like the flash of sunlight sliding over fields of waving green grass on the plains. Much of the time, he felt as if he lived in the shadow that passed over after the light.

He traveled to relieve this feeling, taking consulting jobs all around the world. He spent a lot of time in the garden, and read more and more Chinese poetry, learning Chinese so that he could translate it, albeit clumsily. It suited him. Time was a great sweep of rain, mountains, and rivers. Poets focused with precision on the small, telling details of the place in which they found themselves, and were filled, always, with longing.

I
N 1980, SAM
went to Munich on a job. He’d kept away from Germany, but Jill persuaded him to go.

When the job was finished, he convinced himself to take the train to Oberammergau.

He almost did not go. The pain of not having Bette would be too immediate there, too starkly obvious.

But being in Munich was not as difficult as he had anticipated. The main square was the same, as well as the train station where he and Wink had once arrived at three in the morning, but the rest was just a large, modern city. Oberammergau, more of a tourist destination, would have held on to its past and was, thus, more daunting for Sam to contemplate as the train passed through foothills, and then mountains.

He went, though. As if it were something he needed to see through.

The rolling hills of the countryside, fall-brilliant, seemed to undulate as the train passed. It was still pastoral, and the ancient town was again home to a flourishing NATO school.

Hiking up the mountain much less easily than he had when he was forty, although much more easily than he might have, had his arthritis not been cured by recent medical advances, Sam found the cave mouth one late afternoon. It was getting dark; he should not have started so late. The rusted fence sagged, admitting access, seeming to invite him past the barricade he had so long ago erected.

Taking his halogen flashlight from his pocket, he went inside. He made his way carefully through the cathedral-huge space, where the sound of his footsteps was swallowed by distance. He cast his light here and there and walked farther and then his light caught the edge of something he’d hoped to find. He realized, then, that he had put off this trip for so very long because he did not want to find it absent.

It was Bette’s plane.

When he sat in the cockpit, the dash lit up. His own heartbeat sounded in his ears.

He pushed various pads that appeared, and when it asked him what and when to search for, he simply typed “Bette.”

Ah, Bette.

He felt a plummet, and there was around him just the infinite blackness of the cave. A single, low note vibrated through him, as if someone had plucked a string on a bass.

The memories that rushed through him were almost too much to bear—memories he had tried not to recall for so many years. They simply merged into one entire memory, whole, of a person whose uniqueness was braided through his time, who had made it brilliant and fine and unexpected, a collaboration in the theme of love, with a woman who did not believe in countries, but in people; a woman daring beyond belief. He found himself in a beautiful garden of vision and sound, then he was fighting to stay awake and aware, and lost.

When he regained consciousness, his flashlight was dim. His watch showed that three hours had passed.

He wondered if he’d had a stroke.

At last he climbed down from the plane, found his way out of the cave. Outside it was night, and cold. The little village of Oberammergau lay below, glittering as wind roared in the pines around him. He picked his way down carefully, his light bobbing through blackness, but really did not care much if he were to pitch over a cliff.

He had one more place to visit, though, before heading home. Might as well see it through.

Muchengladbach, Sam found, had officially changed its name to Mönchengladbach in 1950. Now, it was completely built up, a modern city, but he took a cab to Neusser Strasse, just to see it. To his surprise, a chunk of the old neighborhood remained, amid small office buildings and shopping centers.

His footsteps quickened as he walked down the block. Ghosts flocked around him, all the old guys. Earl T., even Wild Card Zee.

And Wink.

He found their town house, still standing in its row, looking well kept. Climbing the stairs, he hesitated a moment. Then he thought, why not.

He knocked on the door.

A middle-aged blonde opened it. Sam cleared his throat. “Do you speak English?” She nodded. “I know this is crazy, but is your name Lise? The aunt of a little girl I knew in the war lived here, and she had no other relatives.”

“And you are?”

“Dance. Sam Dance. We were billeted here during the war and—”

“Mister Sam!” She hugged him, tugged him through the door, opened a bottle of wine, brought out a plate of delicious cheeses and thin black bread. Lise’s husband came home from work and was introduced. They had two children, both in college.

After dinner and coffee, Sam went online and showed them the wartime photos he’d archived, including one of Lise, standing straight in her cotton dress. Her husband was delighted. “There are very few photographs of that time available. I never thought I’d see a picture of her as a little girl.” They insisted that Sam spend the night, and he accepted.

At first he could not sleep, but finally his restlessness subsided. When he woke, it was because moonlight was stabbing his eyes.

Somewhat annoyed at being wakened after his struggle to fall asleep, he pulled on his pants and shirt to make his way down the hall to the bathroom. First, he looked out the window, his old window. He’d been afraid to ask Lise about the summerhouse, but there it was, bathed in moonlight, the marble statue in the same armless condition as thirty-five years earlier.

It was strange to find this past intact, this Lise here.

The garden, illuminated by moonlight, was becoming ragged with fall. The linden tree, now enormous, was still full of leaves, but many were also scattered on the red tile roof of the summerhouse and on the ground.