A Bridge of Years (46 page)

The
house was full of a gray, cloying smoke but the cybernetics had
extinguished all the fires. Ben Collier lay bloody and prostrate at
the top of the stairs. Tom registered this fact but set it aside,
something to be dealt with later.

He
felt giddy going down the stairs. He was in pain, but the pain was
distant from him; he worried about shock. Probably he was in
shock. Whatever that meant or might later mean. It didn't matter now.
He made himself walk.

He
found the marauder some yards into the tunnel.

The
marauder had collapsed—probably for the last time, Tom
thought—against the blank white wall. He was armorless, weaponless,
naked, hurt. Tom felt his fingers open, heard the rattle of his own
weapon as it fell to the floor. The marauder didn't look.

Tom
reached out a hand to support himself but the wall was too smooth; he
lost his balance and sat down hard.

Two
of us here on the floor, Tom thought.

He
was at the brink of unconsciousness. The pain was very bad. He spared
another glance at his ruined left side. His light-headedness lent him
some objectivity.
Singed
meat,
he
thought. He had never thought of himself as "meat" before.
Barbecued
ribs.
It
made him want to laugh, but he was afraid of the sound his laughter
might make in this empty tunnel.

This
transit in time. Not a tunnel under the earth; something
stranger. Strange place to be lying with what might be a mortal
wound, next to the man who had wounded him.

He
saw the marauder move. Dismayed, Tom raised his head. But the
marauder was not hostile, only frightened, trying to back his
broken body away from this:

This
sudden apparition.

This
halo of fight in the shape of a human being.

It
came toward the marauder at a terrible speed.

Time
ghost, Tom thought, too sleepy to be terrified. Doug had called it
that. Ghost of what? Of something native to this fracture in the
world. Of a kind of humanity uprooted from duration.

Something
too big to be contained by his idea of it. He felt its largeness as
it hovered a few feet away. It was large in some dimension he
couldn't perceive; it was many where it seemed to be singular.

He
felt the heat of it wash over his face. He felt it
consider
him
...
and
pass him by. He saw it hover over the marauder, saw it contain that
frightened man in a veil of its own intolerable light. And then it
disappeared, and the marauder was gone with it.

Tom
heard voices calling his name, Joyce's voice among them. He turned
with a feverish gratitude toward the sound, would have stood up but
for the darkness that took him away.

When
he woke there was nothing left of his wound but pink, new skin and an
occasional phantom pain. The cybernetics had healed him, Ben
explained. He'd been asleep for three and a half weeks.

The
house had been healed, too. No trace remained of the smoke and fire
damage. The windows had been replaced and reputtied. The house was
immaculate—spotless.

The
way I found it,
Tom
thought. New and old. A half step out of time.

"There's
someone you need to meet," Ben said.

She
was waiting for him in the kitchen.

Dazed
with his recovery and events that seemed too recent, he didn't
recognize her at first; felt only this powerful sense of familiarity,
a sort of deja vu. Then he said, "You were in the car . . .
driving the car that hit him." He remembered this face
framed in those lights.

She
nodded. "That's right."

She
was gray-haired, fiftyish, a little wide at the hips. She was dressed
in jeans and a blue cotton blouse and thick corrective lenses
that made her eyes seem big.

He
looked again, and the world seemed to slip sideways. "Oh my
god," he said. "Joyce."

Her
smile was large and genuine. "We do meet under the most peculiar
circumstances."

He
spent a few days at the house undergoing what Doug called "emotional
decompression," but he couldn't stay. In effect, the building
had been repossessed. The time terminus was repaired; Tom didn't have
a place here anymore.

He
was homeless but not poor. A sum equivalent to the purchase price of
the house had appeared in a Bank of America account in his name.
Tom asked Ben how this happy event had occurred—not certain he
wanted to know—and Ben said, "Oh, money isn't hard to create.
The right electronics and the right algorithms can work wonders.
It can be done by telephone, amazingly enough."

"Like
computer hacking," Tom said.

"More
sophisticated. But yes."

"Isn't
that unethical?"

"Do
you own this house? Did you really take possession of the chattel
goods to which you're entitled under the contract? If not, would it
be fair to leave you penniless?"

"You
can't just invent money. It has to come from somewhere."

Ben
gave him a pitying look.

The
tunnel was repaired and the time travelers came through it from their
unimaginable future: Tom was allowed a glimpse of them. He stood at
the foot of the basement stairs as they emerged from the tunnel, a
man and a woman, or apparently so—Ben said they changed themselves
to seem more human than they really were. Their eyes, Tom thought,
were very striking. Gray eyes, frankly curious. They looked at him a
long time. Looked at him, Tom supposed, the way he might look at a
living specimen of
Australopithecus
—
with
the peculiar affection we feel for our dim-witted ancestors.

Then
they turned to Ben and spoke too softly for Tom to understand; he
took this as his cue to leave.

Archer
and Catherine made room for him in the Simmons house at the top of
the hill. The bed was comfortable but he planned to leave; he felt
too much like an intruder here. They made allowances for his
disorientation, tiptoed around his isolation. It wasn't a role he
wanted to play.

The
Simmons house was for sale, in any case. Archer had left his job with
Belltower Realty but refused to employ another agent; the
property was "for sale by owner." "It's full of
important memories," Catherine said, "but without Gram
Peggy this place would be a mausoleum. Better to let it go." She
gave him a curious half-sad little smile. "I guess we all came
out of this with new ideas about past and future. What we can cling
to and what we can't."

Archer
said they were moving up to Seattle, where Catherine had a
market for her painting. He could find some kind of work there—maybe
even audit some college courses. Tom said, "Leaving Belltower
after all these years?"

"Cutting
that knot, yeah. It's easier now."

"It
rained morning glories," Tom said.

"All
up and down the Post Road. Morning glories a foot deep."

"Nobody
knows it but us." "Nope. But we know it."

August
had ended. It was September now, still hot, but a little bit of
winter in the air, colder these nights.

He
took his car out of the garage and drove it down to Brack's Auto Body
for a tune-up. The mechanic changed the oil, cleaned the plugs,
adjusted the choke, charged too much. He ran Tom's Visa card through
the slider and said, "Planning a trip?" Tom nodded.

"Where
you headed?"

"Don't
know. Maybe back east. Thought I'd just drive." "No shit?"
"No shit."

"That's
wild," the mechanic said. "Hey, freedom, right?"
"Freedom. Right."

He
made a couple of phone calls from the booth outside.

He
called Tony. It was Saturday; Tony was home and the TV was playing in
the background. He heard Tricia crying, Loreen soothing her.

"I
was passing through town," Tom said. "Thought I'd call."

"Holy
shit," Tony said. "I thought you were dead, I really did.
Are you all right? What do you mean, passing through town?"

"I
can't stay, Tony. You were right about the house. Not a good
investment."

"Passing
through on the way to where?"

He
repeated what he'd told the mechanic: someplace east.

"This
is extremely adolescent behavior. Immature, Tom. This is life, not
'Route 66.' "

"I'll
keep that in mind. Listen, is Loreen around?"

"You
want to talk to her?" He seemed surprised.

"Just
to say hi."

"Well.
Take care of yourself, anyhow. Stay in touch this time. If you need
anything, if you need money—"

"Thanks,
Tony. I appreciate that."

Muffled
silence, then Loreen got on the line. "Just checking in on
my way through town," Tom said. "Wanted to thank you
folks."

They
chatted a while. Barry had been down with chicken pox, home from
school for two weeks. Tricia was cutting a tooth. Tom said he'd been
traveling and that he'd be traveling awhile longer.

"You
sound different," Loreen said.

"Do
I?"

"You
do. I don't know how to describe it. Like you're making peace
with something." He couldn't formulate an answer. She added,
"It's been a long time since that accident. Since your mama and
daddy died. Life goes on, Tom. Days and years. But I guess you know
that."

A
last call, long distance to Seattle; he charged it to his credit
card. A male voice answered. Tom said, "Is Barbara there?"

"Just
a second." Clatter and mumble. Then her voice.

She
said she was glad to hear from him. She'd been worried. It was a
relief to know he was all right. He thanked her for coming to see him
back in the spring. It was good that she cared.

"I
don't think a person stops caring. We didn't work too well together
but we weren't the Borgias, either." "It was good when it
was good," Tom said. "Yes."

"You're
still hooked up with Rafe?" "We're working things out. I
think it's solid, yeah." "There were times I wanted you
back so bad I tried to pretend you didn't exist. Can you understand
that?" "Perfectly," she said. "But those were
real years." "Yes."

"Good
and bad." "Yes."

"Thank
you for those years," he said. She said, "You're going away
again?" "I'm not sure where. I'll call." "Please
do that," she said.

He
drove out of town along the coast highway until he came to the narrow
switchback where his parents had died. He turned off the road at a
scenic overlook some yards up the highway, stepped out of his car and
sat awhile at the stone barricade where the hillside sloped away into
scrub pine and down to the ocean. He had passed this place a dozen
times since the accident but had never stopped, never allowed himself
to contemplate the event. The knock on the door, the inconceivable
announcement of their death—he had considered and reconsidered
those things, but never this place. The mythology but never the fact.
He reminded himself that the tumbling of their vehicle down this
embankment had happened on a rainy day, that the car had crushed
itself against the rocks, the ambulance had arrived and departed, the
wreckage had been lifted by crane and towed away, night fell, the
clouds parted, stars wheeled overhead, the sun rose. Two people died;
but their dying was an event among all the other events of their
lives, no more or less significant than marriage, childbirth,
ambition, disappointment, love. Maybe Loreen was right. Time to take
this bone of bereavement and inter it with all the other bones. Not
bury it but put it in its place, in the vault of time, the
irretrievable past, where memory lived.