Written in Time (5 page)

“Well, yeah. But we’re cool for a while, and all we’ve got to do is write the little sucker.”
 

“It should be a fun book.”
 

Jack Naile agreed with his wife. Of the dozens of novels they’d done over the years, they’d rarely been able to get some of their pet ideas in print—and this book was one of them. Ellen loved the research end of things and their current magnum opus was far more her idea than his. “Just think about it, kid. Pretty soon, we’ll be immersed in El Cid, the Cave of St. John the Divine in the Greek islands and the Great Pyramid at Giza.”
 

“I wish we could go to the Greek islands—nice sandy beaches. I wish we could go anyplace. Egypt would be nice.”
 

“Not in the summer—wrong season. Anyway, we’ve got some science fiction cons to go to over the summer.”
 

“No sandy beaches, just crowded elevators.”
 

Jack Naile started the car. “Bank?”
 

“Bank.”
 

“Can you do those photos for me today?”
 

“This is another one of those roundup articles, isn’t it? Guns, holsters, knives?”
 

“Yeah, well, but the only way I can write it is having the pictures to work from. Only way to organize it.”
 

“I hate roundup articles.”
 

“Well, people like to read—”
 

“Hey, look at this!” Ellen was sifting through what she had labeled as junk mail. “You’ve gotta see this.”
 

Jack Naile put the car back in park, and he and Ellen leaned close together over the center console, their heads touching. In her hands she held a page from a magazine. Attached to it was a small piece of paper with a few typewritten sentences. “I see your articles in the gun magazines a lot. Thought you’d get a kick out of this. Looks like somebody in your family was gainfully employed at one time.” The note was signed with a name Jack Naile didn’t recognize.
 

“Look at the picture! Look, Jack!”
 

He didn’t have his glasses, but a little squinting helped a lot. A caption beneath a black-and-white photograph described a street scene from northern Nevada in 1903. The street was broad, unpaved, dusty, obviously the main drag. Horses and wagons were in the street, as were various pedestrians. On the far side of the street from the camera was a board sidewalk, several wooden storefronts adjacent to it, the buildings packed together like row housing. One of them, the far left edge of its sign almost obscured by a hanging advertising shingle, read “Jack Naile—General Merchandise.”
 

Jack Naile lit a Camel from a half-empty pack and took the Suburban out of park. He made a right, caught the traffic light and paralleled the railroad tracks, made a U-turn across them and then a quick right into the lot for the bank’s drive-thru. “How’s about a cup of coffee when we get home?” Jack asked.
 

“Sounds good.”
 

They were able to pull up at the actual window, Ellen ready with the deposit slip. He signed the check and passed it to the pretty, smiling woman on the other side of the bullet-proof glass.
 

Jack Naile turned up into their steep driveway and, after stopping briefly to let Ellen out, put the Suburban under the portico; the passenger door couldn’t be opened once the Suburban was parked. Parking under the portico always reminded Jack of sticking a size-thirteen foot into a size-twelve shoe. Ellen was already unlocking the house. Jack crossed the broad front porch, and they let themselves in, Jack making a quick right off the shotgun hall and into the office. He wanted to be working on the book, but he had to finish the roundup article. The magazine piece was running too long, but that couldn’t be helped. Pretty soon he’d be stuck until Ellen got the rest of the photos taken and they got them back. That, of course, meant better than twenty miles each way to the only place around that developed black-and-whites. He heard the piss-poor excuse for a car that had at one time been a Saab pulling into the driveway. Without looking away from the computer screen, he called out, “David’s home, Ellen, Elizabeth. Ellen? You hear me?”
 

“I’m not deaf!”
 

The front hallway door was just outside the open door to the office. When Jack Naile heard the door opening, he called out, “Hi, David. Your mom’s got something to show you and your sister. Came in the mail. How was summer school?”
 

“Okay. I’m gonna be late for work, so I’ve only got a minute.”
 

Jack saved what he’d just written and got up from the creaky old swivel chair his father had given him when he was two years younger than David. The chair was used and looked it. Lookswise, it hadn’t changed much since he’d gotten it. But its creaking was getting ominous.
 

“Elizabeth? You dressed yet?” Jack Naile shouted up the stairs to his daughter. “Come on. See this thing we got in the mail!”
 

“Coming, Daddy! Just two minutes.”
 

“I don’t have two minutes, Dad,” David called back over his shoulder as he headed into the bathroom.
 

“You want a sandwich or something?” Ellen asked as David started to close the door.
 

David stuck his head out and said, “Yeah. But I’ve gotta hurry.”
 

“I’m making tuna salad. Want one?”
 

“Sure.”
 

Jack Naile lit a cigarette. He could hear Elizabeth starting down the stairs. For a fifteen-year-old girl, she had the loudest feet. Maybe it was the shoes.
 

“When you finish your cigarette, you want a sandwich, Jack?” Ellen asked as he entered the kitchen.
 

“Sure, princess,” Naile said, leaning across the leg of the L-shaped kitchen counter and giving Ellen a kiss on the tip of her nose. “Smells good.”
 

“How can you smell anything with that cigarette? You should quit. David wants you to quit. Elizabeth wants you to quit.”
 

“You want me to quit?”
 

“Well, if you die because you keep smoking, I can always marry a rich doctor or something. Go ahead. Expose all of us to secondhand smoke. You don’t care.”
 

“Yeah, right.” Ellen had achieved the effect she’d sought. Jack stubbed out his cigarette.
 

“Okay, what’s this thing in the mail?” Elizabeth asked.
 

Jack turned around and glanced at his daughter. She was beautiful, just like her mother, even though she took after his side of the family more. Both kids did, really. Ellen had the gray-green eyes, just like her father and mother. David and Elizabeth had brown eyes, like his. All four of them had the same hair coloring, dark reddish brown, but David’s always looked black. David had curly hair like Tom Selleck, but used mousse and all sorts of other stuff to make his hair appear straight, whereas Elizabeth, of course, had straight hair and tried to make it hold a curl.
 

“Well, what came in the mail?” Elizabeth repeated.
 

As Jack Naile was about to answer, he heard the toilet flush. “Give your brother another minute. We want to see what both you guys think.”
 

Elizabeth shrugged resignedly and sat down on the deacon’s bench at the kitchen table. Jack Naile started to light another cigarette, but Ellen said “Here” and put a dessert plate in his hand with a tuna-salad sandwich and half a kiwi on it.
 

After what was about two minutes—Elizabeth already had her sandwich and Jack Naile’s was half-consumed— David entered the kitchen. “Here,” Ellen Naile said, putting a plate in her son’s hand. “You want another one, the bread’s right there.” She took a bite of her own sandwich.
 

“Where’s the thing that came in the mail?” Jack Naile asked his wife.
 

“Right where you put it.” She took it off the kitchen table and handed it to him.
 

Jack set down his sandwich and sat down at the table. As he opened the envelope and extracted the page cut from the magazine, he declared, “This is really bizarre.”
 

“It’s a picture of an old town,” David announced, looking over his father’s shoulder. Elizabeth had come around to stand beside him. “What’s so amazing—”
 

“Your father wants you guys to look at the name on the store on the far side of the street.”
 

“‘Jack Naile—General Merchandise,’” Elizabeth read aloud.
 

“Ohh. Yeah, that is weird,” David announced as he sat down and started eating.
 

“How’s the math class?” Elizabeth asked her brother.
 

“I’m getting it. I think I’m going to get an A, whereas, if I’d taken it in the fall, well . . .”
 

“Have you got a store meeting tonight, David?” Ellen asked.
 

“As assistant manager, I’ve gotta be there.”
 

“No, I just wanted to double check. You going to have dinner with us?”
 

“Yeah, sure.”
 

Jack Naile swallowed the bite of sandwich that was in his mouth. “Doesn’t anybody have anything to say about the photograph? You guys realize how odd the spelling is for our last name? And then it’s even the same first name! I mean, this is really strange. And what an idea for a book!”
 

“A book?” Elizabeth repeated.
 

“Why did you ask that?” David asked his sister. “Now Dad’ll take the next twenty minutes—”
 

“Hey, think about it!” Jack insisted. “What would happen to a family just like ours if—somehow—we got thrust back in time to turn-of-the-century Nevada?”
 

“I’d be late for work,” David supplied.
 

“No, I mean we could have one hell of a book if we used ourselves as the basis for the characters and then worked out all the planning that would be involved and—”
 

David’s smile was indulgent as he told Jack, “It could never happen, Dad. What? Are they going to invent a time machine or something? Are they going to bump into some crazy professor with a DeLorean like Michael J. Fox did in the movies? Nobody’s ever going to believe it, Dad, because it couldn’t happen in real life. I’ve gotta go.”
 

David was up. Elizabeth said, “You don’t know that it couldn’t happen, David. And that is our name on that store almost a hundred years ago. I think Mom and Dad have a good idea.”
 

David didn’t say it, but Jack could read his son’s thoughts on the young man’s face: either “Suck-up” or “You shouldn’t humor Mom and Dad on stuff like this; they need to write something serious.”
 

David shot everybody a smile and started down the hall.
 

Jack was up, Ellen had never sat down for more than a second and Elizabeth was already following her brother down the hall. “We’ll wave at you, David.”
 

“Fine. See you guys.”
 

The practice of waving was a family tradition, so much so that anytime David or Elizabeth went out with their friends, all of their friends would wave as well. It went according to a well-established pattern; depending on the clemency of the weather it was conducted either wholly from within the house by the storm door (which also involved flashing the porch light) or from the front porch.
 

It was a warm—too warm to Jack’s way of thinking— and dry day, so the exterior wave option was automatically selected. As David was starting down the front steps, his sister was already saying “Give me a kiss, David.” David, of course, did not, but smiled.
 

David was getting into the Bondo-gray splotched Saab as Jack Naile closed the storm door.
 

David, an excellent hand with a manual transmission, was already coasting out of the driveway in reverse as Jack went for the customary cigarette.
 

Jack barely got the cigarette lit in the flame of his Zippo before it was time for the first volley of waves. Jack frequently waved with two hands. Elizabeth sometimes did the two-handed, and that was her selection. Today Ellen, sanest of them all, made her usual one-handed wave. This all transpired as David passed the house. David acknowledged with a gesture halfway between a wave and a salute, accomanied by a slight nod of the head.
 

Jack Naile took another drag on his cigarette as David made a full stop at the corner. David made the left. About thirty feet after completing the turn, it was time for the second volley. Jack again used the two-handed option, as did Elizabeth. Ellen one-handed it. David, in turn, acknowledging the second volley, honked the Saab’s horn.
 

Jack took another drag from his cigarette, walked down the front steps and dropped the filterless cigarette to the concrete, crushing it under his foot.
 

The wave was officially over.
 

“So, you want to help your mother and me with the book, Elizabeth?”
 

Elizabeth, already starting to go inside, responded, “Let me think about it.”
 

“That’s fair, Jack,” Ellen interjected.
 

“It’d beat watching Oprah and Donahue, kid.”
 

“If I were sixteen instead of fifteen, I wouldn’t watch that much TV.”
 

In fairness, she hung out with her friends a lot, read a lot of Danielle Steele and was waiting on word about a part-time job. Sometimes she even helped out in the office. Jack shrugged his shoulders and lit another cigarette. He could sympathize with Lizzie; not being old enough to drive had to suck . . .
 

The scrunchy in her ponytail was giving Ellen a little headache, so she took it off, stopping in the downstairs bathroom to run a brush through her hair. That done, she continued on her way to the office. As she entered the room, Jack wasn’t writing. He was picking up the telephone. “What are you doing? I thought you were working on the book or the article or something. You’re trying to find out more about the photo, right?”