Time After Time (39 page)

Her heart was so full. Her
emotions seemed to be equal parts of pain and happiness; they
weighed so heavily on her that there was no room for the strange
unease she'd felt, the night before, of being watched and in
danger. On a bright new morning she found it
impossible to feel anything like fear.

She only had room for
love. She missed Susy terribly; she longed for Jack even more. And
Christopher Eastman? Ghost or fantasy, he'd become as much a part
of her life as Susy and now Jack. What did he want? What did he
need? If only she knew, she could take care of it and set his soul
free.

"If you don't tell me,
Christopher," she said, staring at the swirling sea below, "how can
I help you?"

She sighed, and shook her
head, and straightened up to go. When she turned, there he was,
leaning against the sea wall not ten feet away from her. This time
she was hardly surprised.

He was nattily dressed in
a blue, almost black flannel blazer; the straw boater banded in
crimson and gold on his head was tipped at a jaunty angle. His arms
were folded across his chest in a manner she knew well; his foot
was braced against the granite wall. It was a casual pose,
elegantly struck. He looked exactly like what he was: the well-born
son of American aristocrats.

She stared at him, wishing
desperately that he could speak — willing him, with all her soul,
to say something.

"Good morning," he said
pleasantly. "Do you come here often?"

Liz gasped and jumped
back, struck dumb by his fluency. She waited, wide-eyed, for the
apparition to speak again; but he seemed to be expecting her to
respond to his opener.

After a fearful
hesitation, she decided to answer him.

"Gee, I knew that w-was an
old line," she stammered, "b-but I didn't think it was
that
old."

"I beg your pardon?" he
said, not getting it at all.

"Wh-what you said about
coming here often: it sounded like a come-on."

"Come on? Are we going
somewhere?"

"No, no — never mind," she
croaked. She glanced up and then down the path — no one around,
thank God — then turned back to the apparition and cleared her
throat, still searching for her normal voice. "I'm ... I'm having
trouble seeing your face," she said, squinting at him more closely
now.

"It could be the hat," he
said. He took it off and flung it like a Frisbee into the air over
the ocean below; she followed its path, then lost it in the
sun.

"Is this better?" he
asked, turning back to face her. She shook her head. "You've always
been clearer than this."

"Conversing with you takes
a great deal of energy."

"I like to think I'm easy
to talk to!" she said with offended whimsy.

He seemed to smile. "I
mean to say, I have a limited amount of energy with which to
manifest myself. I can appear to you, or I can speak to you. If I
do both at once, the quality of each suffers."

In fact, his voice was
faint.

"Tell ... please ... why
haven't you spoken to me before now?" she begged to
know.

Christopher Eastman seemed
amused by the question. She couldn't really tell, because he was
becoming hazier, which she blamed at least partly on the sun
shining behind him — or through him.

"There are rules of
conduct," he said. "We do not speak unless we're asked
to."

"We? There are more of
you?"

"Oh, yes."

Oh, great.
"Will I be seeing them, too?"

"I cannot imagine why.
Your concern is with me."

As she thought. "It was
the lacquered box, wasn't it? You got out when I opened it in the
locksmith's shop."

"If you prefer to believe
that, by all means do," he said. "But the truth is hardly as
picturesque."

"Tell me the truth, then,"
she begged in a whisper.

"The truth, my dear lady,
is that you are in danger of committing the same fatal mistake in
your affair of the heart as I did."

"You mean, of falling in
love with someone I have nothing in common with — with whom I have
nothing in common with?" she said in confusion.

His laugh sounded sad and
empty. "No, I mean the opposite. I mean this: You love Jack
Eastman, and you hope that he loves you; yet you are unwilling to
believe that a match between you can thrive."

"Aren't you putting the
cart before the horse?" she asked, her natural skepticism
reasserting itself. "Your great-great-grandson seems in no hurry to
marry."

"He will be," Christopher
Eastman said. "Jack is of an age when a man begins to recognize a
void in his life. He longs for something more, something deeper.
Ah, well. You will have to accept the declaration on faith. You're
a woman, after all; you cannot be expected to
understand."

"I see," Liz said, her
feminine hackles rising up. "It's one of those guy-things, is
it?"

"I beg your
pardon?"

"Never mind. Anyway, even
supposing he does love me and may someday be willing to marry me —
even supposing all that, which I do not — the match could hardly
thrive. I don't know how much you know about modern marriage, but
one out of two of them ends in divorce."

"Ah. I was not aware of
that."

"You should have done your
homework, then," she said with some asperity. "Before you went
scaring people out of their wits."

"I
have
done what you call my
home-work," he shot back. "I know that barriers between men and
women that were insurmountable a hundred years ago no longer exist.
Anyone, I see, can marry anyone these days."

"Yeah, well, maybe that's
why one in two ends in divorce," Liz cracked.

Out of the corner of her
eye, she saw an early morning jogger approaching them on the path.
In a panic she turned her back on the ghost, reasoning that if she
couldn't see Christopher Eastman, maybe the jogger wouldn't notice
him either.

As it turned out, the
jogger didn't see either one of them; he just shot on by, totally
focused on his pain.

"Should you not set the
police on that fellow?" asked Christopher, alarmed.

"Good lord, why?" asked
Liz. "For exercising?"

"Exercising
what?"

"His muscles. What
else?"

"He puts himself in a
lather for no practical purpose? He is not delivering an urgent
message, or flying to his mother's deathbed? He's doing that for
... for? He was at a loss for words.

"For
tone,"
said Liz. "Never mind. How —
what — oh God — where do I start?" Frustrated, she buried her face
in her hands, trying to center her thoughts, then looked
up.

Still there. But for how
long?

"Why didn't you marry
Ophelia?"
It was the question that burned
the hottest in her mind.

Christopher bowed his head
in an eloquent expression of regret. For a long time he said
nothing. When he looked up, Liz was surprised to see that he had
become more real, as if she'd finally gotten him tuned in, somehow.
His face, so clear, so handsome, was the picture of
pain.

"I
wanted
to marry Ophelia," he said.
"I loved no other woman, ever, besides her. But two things happened
— one of them trivial, the other significant."

Liz said softly, "Someone
took the pin. And your brother was killed."

"Yes. Of course you know
all that. My plan to announce our betrothal — thwarted the first
time by that meddlesome, disagreeable St. Onge woman — became
postponed again in the grief and chaos that resulted from my
brother's sudden death."

"'Postponed'? I
guess
it became
postponed. For eternity, as far as I can tell," Liz said before she
could stop herself.

He averted his face, as if
she'd slapped it.

"I begged Ophelia to be
patient," he said, obviously in agony after the brutal reminder.
"She would not. I needed only a few months to put my family's
affairs back on course. My father was ailing, my brother gone;
there was no one else."

He turned away from Liz to
look at the sea. "It took me a long time to understand that Ophelia
was dismayed by my priorities. Who can blame her? Overnight, I had
turned into a dutiful son and become a faithless lover."

He added bitterly, "I did
my job well. But without Ophelia the Eastman fortune became nothing
more than cold, cruel comfort."

Liz said to him, amazed,
"Is it possible you don't know? Ophelia never told you she
was
pregnant
by
you?"

Christopher turned back
sharply, then went very still. Clearly he did not know. Liz had no
idea what the risks were for revealing secrets to long-departed
souls, but she'd just taken a huge one. She watched, trembling, as
a hundred years of regret fused into a single moment of
horror.

"This cannot be true!"
Christopher said angrily — and the sea itself seemed to rise up in
indignation. Suddenly it sounded louder, closer. Unconsciously, Liz
stepped away from the sea wall.

It was impossible for her
to see Christopher Eastman's face, to understand what was happening
to him. He seemed to pulsate and shimmer in place, a concentration
of energy unlike anything she'd ever known. She looked away — it
was too much like looking at the sun — but then she was compelled
to look back at him, despite her terror. The hair on her skin stood
up, and it was suddenly harder to breathe. She began shivering
violently. Nothing in her life had prepared her for this. She had
to bite her lip to keep herself from whimpering; to hug herself, to
reassure herself of her own physicality. She was afraid to stay,
unable to go.

"God in heaven!" he cried
in anguish. "I see it now! She was too proud to throw her condition
in my face; if I would not marry her for herself, she had no use
for me. Ah, that pride of hers! That overbearing, self-destructive
pride! It made her refuse to play the trump card that all women
possess."

Not all of us,
thought Liz, flinching.

"She tested me, and I
failed the test utterly! Ophelia!" He turned away from Liz, toward
the sea. "Oh, God
... Ophelia," he said in
a broken voice.

His pain ripped through
Liz like a blade. Ignorant of ghostly conventions, she had no idea
how to console him. She could only try in human ways, on human
terms.

"Please — please don't do
this to yourself," she begged him. "If it's any comfort to you, I
can tell you that Ophelia was cared for by a good man — a shoemaker
in town, Anton Pinhel. I've been to see her grave. She lived a long
life."

"Without me, without me,"
Christopher moaned. "And I without her. What
waste
.
What
pain
."

"I'm so sorry," said Liz
awkwardly. "Maybe I shouldn't have told you any of this. I — I
can't believe you didn't know."

"She married very quickly
... I assumed, to hurt me. Whatever the reason, it would have been
dishonorable to pursue her after that."

"Excuse me?" Liz dared to
say. "From what I've read in the letters, you were a bit of a
—"

"Not with married women!"
he flashed. "Never, with a married woman!"

He reminded her, just
then, of Jack: a man who'd devised a strict moral code of his own
and who didn't give much of a damn what society had to say about
it.

"Can I — can I ask you
something?" she ventured.

"Ask," he said in a flat,
dead voice. He was standing against the sea wall, arms limp at his
side, head bowed in sorrow. He was hard to see, harder to hear.
Whatever he'd just gone through, it had consumed him.

"How does that work? I
mean, don't you learn all the answers to things after
you—?"

"Pass on?" he said, using
the grim euphemism.

Liz winced and said, "Yes.
After you die. Shouldn't you be able to look all this up
somewhere?"

"I see. You assume that
there is a City Hall in Heaven, is that it?" he said with a flash
of Jack's wryness.

"Is that so very funny?"
Liz asked. "I should think that enlightenment is the least we can
expect for giving up everything we have on earth. We ought to be
able to know exactly where we screwed up — failed, that is — and
where we did well."

"Some may have been given
that satisfaction," he said quietly. "I was not. I know what I knew
on earth, just enough to get me started on this mission. Which, I
may say, you are not making any easier," he said, annoyance
creeping into his manner.

He folded his arms across
his chest in a way that, again, reminded Liz of Jack. "Are you as
contentious with Jack as you are with me?" he asked. "You remind me
more than a little of—" He laughed softly and finished his thought.
"Of Ophelia. Of course you would. You have her blood in
you."