Reaching Through Time (20 page)

“Did he, now?” Sandra said skeptically. “Everything, you say.”

“Um—everything he said he remembered,” Maura said, confused and less sure of herself.

Sandra turned from the grill to face Maura. “Did he also tell you that he tried to kill himself because of it?”

M
aura felt blindsided. After all the time she’d spent with Dylan, how could she have missed it? Was that what he was protecting behind the wall inside his head, the actions of grief, guarded by sentries of memory cells? “No,” Maura said. “He didn’t tell me.”

Sandra slumped, her expression turning raw. “He was hurt really badly himself in the accident. In the hospital, in traction after surgery, his leg set with steel rods and screws. He couldn’t even visit Catherine, and when he did …” She paused. “At first, she was in this coma and we kept thinking, ‘She’ll wake up any day now.’ But she never did. She just sank lower, and nothing the doctors did made a hill of beans’ worth of difference.”

Maura sensed Sandra’s despair, but she didn’t interrupt the flow of her story.

“The longer Catherine lay in the hospital, the deeper
Dylan went into depression. His body healed, but his heart—” She looked out to the perfectly maintained backyard, the well-trimmed grass, the freshly mulched flower beds.

Dylan’s work, Maura realized. Ordered and groomed and expertly kept. The work that held him together.

Sandra said, “He missed months of school. He had to repeat his junior year. We got him tutors so he could finish with his class, but it made him angry. ‘I’ll finish when Catherine does,’ he told us.

“ ‘But she’ll never finish,’ his dad and I told him. ‘You have to go on with your life.’ Instead, last summer he tried to
take
his life.”

Maura shuddered. Tears welled in her eyes. Suicide, a Mind Doctor’s greatest failure. “What did he do?”

“Went in the garage and turned on his car after closing and locking all the doors. I’d taken the twins shopping and Jerry was at the clinic. We’d replaced the car that was burned in the wreck. At the time, we thought it would cheer him up. Can you imagine? Cheering up clinical depression. We were stupid.”

Maura knew that wasn’t true. Dylan just hadn’t been diagnosed. “You shouldn’t blame yourselves.…” Maura’s stock answer embarrassed even her. “I—I mean, that’s what I’ve heard.”

Sandra shrugged. “Thank God Lucy got a stomachache and we had to leave the mall early. When I opened the
garage door, the exhaust fumes and carbon monoxide almost knocked me over. I called nine-one-one and he was rushed to the hospital. They saved him, and we made certain he went into therapy.”

Maura saw the scene in Sandra’s head like a three-dimensional movie, the garage full of toxic fumes, the twins screaming hysterically, Sandra pulling an unconscious Dylan from the car and out onto the driveway. “Did the therapy help?”

“It seems to. He takes medicine, visits his psychiatrist, though not as much as he used to. He returned to school last spring and will face his senior year this fall.”

“But he still insists on seeing Catherine once a week,” Maura said.

“Yes. It breaks our hearts, but he won’t give it up.”

Penance, Maura surmised; a way to soothe his guilt. “Do her parents blame him?”

“I don’t think so. It was an accident … every mother’s greatest fear. Dylan and Catherine were sixteen. Their curfews were midnight, and when our phone rang at one a.m., I knew something horrible had happened.”

Maura thought of her own mother. Was she mourning the loss of her daughter?

“We rushed to the hospital, fearing the worst. Dylan was conscious, and Catherine’s parents were so grateful she was alive.…” Sandra paused. “Now they maintain her at the rehab center even though there’s no hope.”
Sandra gave Maura a wondering look. “Do you know that the longest record for survival of a PVS patient is over forty years?”

In Maura’s time, there were no PVS patients. Once Medical Sensitives proclaimed a human being dead, food and water were withdrawn and the victim died. To her, prolonging such a patient’s life seemed primitive and a poor practice of medicine. “I didn’t know.”

“You’ve been good for him, you know.”

“Me?”

Sandra smiled. “Yes, you. He’s been happier these past couple of months than in the last two years.”

The words pleased Maura, but the feeling of satisfaction was brief.

Sandra sighed. “We’ll miss you when you leave. I wish you lived closer. I wish you went to school here. But I guess your parents miss you terribly.”

For the first time in a long while, Maura felt a jolt from her conscience, remembering the lies she’d told Dylan to explain her sudden appearance in his time stream. Without his help, she would never have been able to stay. And she never would have had the experiences that had enriched her life. She would have never had fallen in love. True to his word, he’d kept her secrets—lies all, but Dylan didn’t know that. “I hate the idea of leaving too,” she said with more sincerity than Sandra could possibly understand.

Sandra pulled the burgers off the grill, but they looked shrunken, black and hard. She stared at them. “I ruined the burgers. Let me go make some more patties.”

“That’s all right,” Maura said, standing once she saw how dark it had grown. “I’ve got stuff at home to eat, and you probably have to leave soon to get the girls, don’t you?”

“Oh my gosh! I let the time slip.”

“No problem.”

Sandra thrust a bag of chips at Maura. “I’ve got to run. I can drop you at your grandparents’ on the way.”

“I like walking. It’s only a couple of blocks.”

“Help yourself to anything in the kitchen,” Sandra said, hurrying into the house for her purse and car keys.

Maura waited on the patio until she heard Sandra’s car leave the driveway, feeling sad, adrift in time, and lonely. She missed her family, wished she could figure out what to do. She couldn’t stay, and she would be in colossal trouble if she returned. But what choice did she have? Better to return voluntarily than to be jerked home by the cops. She picked some vegetables from Sandra’s small garden and walked around to the front.

Bright headlights nailed her as she tried to cross the driveway. Her heart skipped a beat. Dylan’s car stopped and she calmed down. “Hey,” she called.

He got out of the car, came up to her. “Chips and veggies for me?”

“If you want them.” Just the sight of him made her pulse race and brightened her mood.

“No … I’m trying to quit.”

She weighed his words, realized he was joking. “Me too.” Stars had begun to pop out overhead. “You finished for the day?”

“I’m finished.” He looked bone tired.

“I was just going home. Want me to stay awhile?”

“Um—about that. The Carters called today. They’ll be home Friday, so that means you’ll have to vacate.”

“In two days?” Tension gripped Maura.

“I know it’s short notice. Look, if you want, you can crash here for a few days. Until you’re ready to go home. Or run again. You should have some money saved up by now. Wasn’t that your plan?”

That was what she’d told him. “How would I explain it to your family? They think I’m at my grandparents. What reason could I give for leaving their home for yours?”

He thought about it, rubbed his temples. “We’ll come up with something tomorrow.”

“Sure, we’ll figure something out,” she said, knowing she was out of options. She had to go.

Dylan draped his forearms over her shoulders, lowered his forehead to touch hers. His skin was still warm from his day in the sun. She closed her eyes, breathed in the scent of him, stored the puff of his breath in her memory cells so that whenever she needed to, or wanted to, she could conjure him up, could bask in the feel, scent, taste of him. She envied the past Catherine had with him,
the sweetness of it. She imagined that he loved her, Maura, as he’d loved Catherine.

He raised her chin a fraction of an inch and brushed his lips across hers. This time she didn’t stop him. “We’ll think of something,” he said, and pulled away.

Maura fought tears, turned abruptly and jogged down the sidewalk, her heart aching. And yet, as she ran, it struck her that in spite of what Sandra had told her earlier, Maura had sensed no antidepression medications in Dylan’s system. None at all.

M
aura cleaned the house, erasing all traces of her long stay. She had total recall, so it was simple to restore each room to its original state. She even turned coffee-table books to the exact angle arranged by the Carters. The cats watched from atop an armoire, their tails twitching with interest and curiosity. “You are nosey beasts,” Maura told them, very glad that animals couldn’t talk. “But I’ll miss you.”

Chowder was much more concerned about her activity, and he was anxious and unsettled. The dog followed her from room to room, staying close to her heels, sometimes making her trip over him. She often stopped working, trying to reassure him. She would miss him, and understood why owning a pet was so popular in this day and time. They brought comfort and affection and were of great service to the elderly and lonely. Too bad keeping one was prohibitively expensive in her time.

She sat on the sofa and Chowder rested his head on her knee, staring up at her with sad brown eyes. Maura rubbed his thick fur, scratched behind his ears the way he liked. She cupped his muzzle. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure you get back to Doc Jerry. He’ll find you a good home.”

A lump rose in her throat. “Thanks for taking care of me. They would have found me sooner if you hadn’t warned me.” Chowder tilted his head. “I’m going back,” she told the dog. “Better to go on my own than with the cops, don’t you think?” She gazed into the dog’s questioning eyes. “Maybe I can explain how I only wanted to help Dylan. I was making headway too.” She would still be punished, though. She disliked imagining that part, but facing punishment was mandatory. “I’m not
changing
anything,” she reminded the dog. Maybe it would count in her favor when she stood in front of the judge for sentencing. The penalties for time travel without permission were harsh, but changing history was the ultimate crime.

Tomorrow she’d drop her clothing, plus everything else she’d acquired in this time stream, into a charity bin. The money would be an especially nice discovery for the organization. She planned to take the dog to Dylan’s house on Friday evening while everyone was at the dance recital. She’d told Jerry at work that day that her grandparents would be bringing her to the recital.

Jerry had grinned. “Good! We’ve wanted to meet them.”

Leaving Dylan would be the hardest of all. Best to
never see him again. “Eventually people here will forget about me. So will you.” She ruffled Chowder’s fur. “Someday Sandra or Jerry or the girls might ask, ‘Whatever became of that girl who just vanished one night?’ And Dylan might say, ‘She was a runaway. Probably didn’t want to go home.’ ” Once he filled in details, they would have an acceptable explanation for her disappearing act and they would forget she ever existed.

But she would never forget them.

On Friday morning she fed and watered the cats, took all her personal belongings to the charity drop and went to Dylan’s house, where she hitched a ride to work—her final day—with Jerry. The day seemed to move more swiftly than usual—an impossibility, of course. Time moved the same way every day, second by second, minute by minute, hour by hour. She told each animal goodbye. Most understood. They absorbed human emotions, and mourned when they cared for a person who was troubled in any way.

After work she rode with Jerry to his house. Dylan’s car was gone, which made her both sad and glad. Acting nonchalant with him when she knew she was leaving would be difficult.

She got out of the car. Jerry called, “See you at the recital.”

“Sure thing.”

At the Carter house Chowder greeted her from the
backyard, where Maura kept him during the day. She brought him inside, fed and watered him, washed the bowls and put them away in the cupboards. She greeted the cats, who acted aloof. They were distancing themselves from her, uncanny in their ability to convey their displeasure. “Don’t be snooty,” she told them, but they turned tail and stalked from the room.