The Time Travel Chronicles (53 page)

* * *

I hadn’t expected to see them after I was arrested at the hospital in Bracebridge, and I was surprised when the two of them showed up at juvey court, Martin limping in and Grace following after with his briefcase and my duffel. He asked to meet with me—his ‘client’, he called me in front of the judge—in order to represent my interests.

The judge and the cops and Helmut and Marthe had been surprised by that, but Martin had spoken briefly with the judge, explaining who he was, and then, when we three were alone, he started questioning me.

“Why did you threaten them?” he asked.

“Got tired of bein’ knocked around,” I said, frowning at the directness of his questions.

“They’re not allowed to do that, you know, that’s abuse,” he replied. “Tell me, Jimmy, they ever make you work for them?”

I described working at Marthe’s brother’s farm.

“They pay you?” he asked.

On hearing I worked for free he glanced at Grace, nodded and said, “Okay, let me see what I can do.”

He made short work of my foster parents. I found out that day that smacking around foster kids and using them for free labour was frowned upon by the Children’s Aid. The judge said he intended to place me with another couple and confronted the Reiners, asking if they still wanted to charge me, because if they did, he was sure Mr. Adler would be filing abuse charges. Helmut fumed silently, casting vicious looks my way. At least Marthe had the decency to act all sheepish. The court case disappeared as fast as the Reiners left the courtroom.

Grace and Martin asked the judge for temporary custody and arranged for the Children’s Aid to find foster parents in Toronto. I wasn’t surprised when it turned out to be them. Somewhere during those happy months they were the ones I told of my dream to work as a mechanic. Without a second thought they found a good technical high school down there and then a community college and an apprenticeship. I lived in their place until I moved out on my own.

Later, when I met Sandra, she wanted to be close to her parents in Owen Sound, so I found a garage that was up for sale; we got married and made a go of it. The Adlers’ huge wedding cheque paid for most of the buy-in on the business and Martin did the legal work then just as he did for our wills and mortgages and everything else. Both our families had kids and we laughed and celebrated holidays together, visited the cottage in summer, and gave each other presents. This bounty all grew from a decision I was allowed to remake on a stormy night fifty years ago, and I never had occasion to ask Grace how much she remembered of her other life until just last week.

“James, I wonder if you can come and help me with something next week,” she said one day over the phone. I was never ‘Jimmy’ to her. She always called me James. “Are you busy Thursday afternoon?”

“Well …” I hesitated. “I guess I can leave the garage for a day. Hardy and my apprentice can handle it while I’m gone. What do you need?”

“I wonder if you might be able to meet me at the farm. One o’clock, say?”

“Yeah, I can make it by one. What’s up?”

She hesitated, I guess fearing I might not want to come. “It’s just that Martin wanted his ashes spread at the cottage. I want you to be with me, that’s if Sandra will lend you to me for the afternoon. I know it’s illegal. Goodness me, a lawyer’s wife committing a crime!” She giggled.

“Of course,” I replied instantly. “I’ll pick you up.”

“Thank you.”

“Just you and me, then?”

“And Martin,” she said.

* * *

When I pulled in, she was waiting on the porch, holding her maroon purse with the worn clasp and her grey hair in a ponytail.

“All set to go?” I asked brightly.

“Just about,” she replied and walked by my car out to the shed. She unlocked the doors and I helped her push them aside and pull off the tarp, knowing exactly what she had in mind. The red Mustang sat gleaming in the light streaming in through the doors.

“Looks great, doesn’t she?” I said.

“Sure does. You two have kept her going for over fifty years. Did you realize it had been that long?”

“Martin loved this car. Told me he was never getting rid of her. They’ll have to pry it out of my dead hands, he said!” Immediately I realized how hurtful that might have sounded. “I-I’m sorry, Grace, I … that was thoughtless of me.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I know what you meant,” she said, setting aside my apology. “But there was a truth in it all the same.”

“What do you mean?”

She smiled that faraway smile. There were tears in her eyes and she blinked them away before turning to me. “It’s not in his will. All that we are going to do today, I mean. It was his private wish to have his ashes scattered at the cottage at Pritchard’s Landing and that you and I be the ones to do it. Don’t worry. You know Martin. Covered his tracks well as far as the legal side of things go. They think he’s in the cemetery in Mount Pleasant.”

“Well, after all he has done for me, I don’t care if it’s legal or not.”

“He loved you like a son. I hope you know that, James.”

“Yeah,” I said, the word almost strangling in my throat. I could feel tears welling in my eyes. Working on the car had brought Martin and I together. Over the years, we’d spent a lot of Saturdays on the red Mustang. It had been my secret penance for the crime I had committed in my ‘other life’ and my own way of thanking him.

She went around and opened the passenger door. Getting in, she said, “Time to go.”

I got in and she reached into her purse, but she paused as if sensing I’d chosen that moment to ask her. “Grace, did you ever think what our lives might have been if we hadn’t met that night at the landing?”

She paused, a glimmer of her smile playing at the corner of her lips. “Of course I have,” she began. “Things would have been very different. I’ve had dreams where he didn’t survive and you weren’t there. Nightmares, really. I ended up a bitter and miserable old woman.”

“What about me?” I wanted to know.

“You?” She chuckled. “Well, I don’t know, but somehow I knew things might not have turned out so well.”

I glanced down at my hands, turning them over to see the knuckles, thinking I might find LOVE and HATE roughly scratched into them with reform school ink, but saw only blank wrinkled skin.

“These are yours now,” she said, handing me the keys. “The ownership is signed over to you. It’s in the glove compartment. Martin wanted you to have her. So when we come back, you keep her. Be sure to take good care of her. I’ll want a ride every now and then, of course.”

When I drove out of the shed I stopped and got out to close the doors. Turning back to the Mustang, for just the most fleeting of moments, I saw a young, beautiful woman with brilliant auburn hair sitting in the passenger seat, but then the vision was gone, dissolved away into nothing.

We drove down her laneway and turned the Mustang east towards Pritchard’s Landing.

A Word on Michael Holden

Michael Holden is the author of
The Duke's Moor
,
The Moor's Journey
and the upcoming
Nicholas Jones
historical novels.

After a long career as a teacher of elementary students in Owen Sound, London, and Hanover Ontario, and an administrator in schools in Hanover and Paisley, Ontario, Michael worked as a tour manager for tours to New York, Quebec, and Ottawa.

Currently he works from home in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada as a freelance writer of mostly fictional works of historical fiction, literary fiction, and children's literature.

He is an avid tennis fan and player, and guitarist for
The Screaming Neckties
.

http://www.michaelholden.ca

by Samuel Peralta

September 15, 2006

THAT AUTUMN SHE’S BACK in Toronto, staying at her mom’s place, before deployment. At Queen’s Quay Terminal, her two girlfriends go inside to grab a coffee, to stave off the late afternoon chill. She stays outside to check in, but the phone at her mom’s rings four, five, six times, and she flips her phone closed before it goes to voice mail.

There’s a soft crush of wind, and she hugs herself in her jacket. Time for that coffee. She turns, and that’s when she sees him. All in black, reminding her of Steve Jobs with his turtleneck and slacks, except didn’t Steve wear Adidas, and oh my God doesn’t he remind her of that lead in the Bryan Singer movie, and—

He collapses, crumples on the ground. She runs up the steps to him, but already he’s pulling himself up, bracing himself against the wall of the terminal building.

Just as she reaches him, he looks up, and their eyes meet. Suddenly, a feeling overcomes her: that this face is familiar, that she knows him, that they’ve met before. In his eyes there’s a similar flash of recognition.

At his feet, a glimmer catches her attention, and she picks it up. A silver medallion, in the shape of a spiral nautilus, on a chain. She holds it out to him. “Yours?” she asks.

He takes it, holding her hand for just a fraction of a moment too long. “Oh God, I hope so,” he says.

They break off, both now blushing. She’s just decided she should be running off, when his knees buckle again and he hits the pavement. This time she has to pull him up and lean him against the wall herself. Nothing on his breath. Clean-shaven.

“I’m sorry,” he says, when he’s recovered. “It’s just been a long journey.”

She hesitates a bit before deciding. “Listen,” she says. “I think you need to sit down and get something to eat. Why don’t you join me and you can catch your breath? I’ll buy.” She holds out her hand. “I’m Caitlyn.”

“Sean Forrest,” he says. “Happy to meet you.”

Rotini in marinara sauce at the restaurant inside, and she’s chattering away, about the closing of
The Lord of The Rings
stage show at the Princess of Wales Theatre, about Jonathan Safran Foer’s latest book, about Spenser and the difference between Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets—and wouldn’t he like to read one she’s written, which she happened to carry with her?—and when her phone rings, an hour has passed. It isn’t her mom, it’s her friends—wondering where in the world is she?

She tells them she’ll catch up with them later at the club, turns back to him, and they pick it up as if she’d never left off.

She talks about James Blunt and Kelly Clarkson, about
Gilmore Girls
and
24
, about conspiracies and terrorists, about North Korean politics, about Middle Eastern food, about how her family makes their own tomato sauce.

He talks about rotini, about patterns in nature, about Gödel and Escher and Bach, about Rachmaninoff and Paganini, about nautilus shells and hurricanes and satellite orbits, about integer series and golden means.

Over coffee and dessert, she asks if he’ll accompany her to the Rex, the jazz bar where her friends are going that night.

“I’ve got to go home tonight,” he says. “This was supposed to be a one-time trip. But I’m thinking—” And he stops here, for what feels like a long, long time. Then: “I’m thinking that I want to make it back next year.”

“Oh no!” she says. “It’d be amazing, but I’m headed to Kandahar.”

He looks stunned, like he doesn’t know where that is.

“Afghanistan. I’m with the Canadian team at the R3 MMU. Combat operations field hospital.”

He’s still speechless.

“Oh heck, it’s only for two tours,” she says. “I’ll be back in a couple. How about we make a date for the future?”

That seems to break the trance. But what he does next is unexpected. He takes off his medallion, takes her hand, and presses it into her palm.

“Yours,” he says.

September 17, 2007

Southwest of Kandahar. Earlier that day, helicopters streamed like tremulous wasps into Zhari District, ferrying back remains from a shattered infantry battalion. Under her breath, another whispered prayer. Sometimes prayers are answered by a different god.

Behind blast walls ten feet high, at the edge of the runway of the Kandahar Airfield, the NATO Role 3 Multinational Medical Unit, or R3MMU, is an assemblage of field-deployable hospital structures, shipping containers, canvas tents, and leaking plywood buildings.

Despite this, the Canadian Forces Health Services team tasked with command of the R3MMU is on its way to the highest survival rate ever recorded for victims of war.

But Cpl. Caitlyn McAdams, in the middle of her first nine-month tour, isn’t at her regular station that night.

That week they’re short-staffed at the forward operating base at Ma’sum Ghar, so Cpl. McAdams and Cpl. Paul Francis are on temporary rotation there from R3MMU, twenty miles away.