The Time Travel Chronicles (52 page)

The lightning flashed. I reached toward the glove compartment and felt around inside. The key was there. I pulled it out and held it wrapped in my hand. And there I sat.

Just a little ride …
echoed in my head.

Just a little ways
…

Then with the key resting warmly in my palm, as the lightning flashed and thunder cracked loudly over the wind-whipped waves out on the lake, an old memory sprang forward from some other part of my mind, long set aside. From a deep, secretive corner where I had stuffed memories from darker times.

* * *

I was sitting at a table, one of those cheap, arborite veneer rectangular ones they have in cop interrogation rooms. There was nothing on the walls but a mirror meant to hide a one-way viewing room, and I knew someone was probably watching from behind it. The chair felt hard under me. The light was too bright.

A cop sat across from me—a cop with greased back hair who smelled of Brylcream. “Sit up!” he barked at me. Someone sat beside me, a younger guy with a chinless face, some lawyer they’d given me. He whispered to me.

“Jimmy,” he said, “they think you have something to do with stealing a car a few months back.”

“Don’t know why,” the cop said, “maybe it’s the way you are just too cocky, but I believe you were down near Pritchard’s that day. I think you stole that car and if I can ever prove it, I’ll hang it on you, you little prick.”

“If you’re not gonna charge me then fuck off!” I yelled at him. Yonge Street had changed me, toughened me up. By then cops didn’t faze me. He glared at me and I stared right back at him. Deny. Deny. Deny.

And afterwards, after the anger, after the lying, my face hot and flushed, the two of them were out in the hallway. Through the noise of the station, I could hear only small snatches of what they were saying.

“ … little bastard was there. I’m sure he’s …”

“He says no and you have no proof, so …”

“… manslaughter charges …”

“Manslaughter?” The lawyer’s voice was louder then. “With what proof, huh?”

“ … they hadn’t screwed up the evidence in Bracebridge. Jesus, Tom, that little bugger’s gonna walk away free …”

And then I heard a sound from behind the mirror. Crying. Someone was watching me and crying. I stood up and looked into the mirror, trying to see beyond it. It was as if we were staring at each other and, though I couldn’t see them, whoever was there could see me. I went over to the switch and turned off the light, but when I returned to the mirror and put my face up close to it, I could still see only movement and a door opening to a lit hallway. Standing silhouetted against the light was a girl, a young woman with red hair, and as she rushed into the hallway, before the door closed, she glanced back at me and I saw her tear-streaked face.

Over the next few decades, when I was drunk or stoned out, that memory would come back to me, as if some part of me knew it was somehow important.

Sitting in the Mustang, I realized what I had done. I hadn’t meant to hurt anyone, but I had. I had only meant to escape, but I hadn’t. Instead I had trapped myself in a life I would never have wanted.

I began crying. For absolutely no reason I started blubbering like a baby. Just sat with the key in my hand bawling my eyes out. And when I was finished I put the key back. As I let go of it, this wash of relief, like warm rain, descended on me. I looked into the rearview mirror at my young, unlined face and saw that the past could really be changed. I wiped my eyes on my sleeve and grabbed my duffel bag. I didn’t want to be in the car and I knew somehow that my not taking it was important to more than just me.

It was raining like a son of a bitch, so I ran over to the shack. Under the projecting eave of the stand, there was a dry spot. I squatted there cold, tired, and wet, but I knew somehow I had to wait there.

I was shivering, cursing myself for being stupid, when I heard her. Out there, out on the lake, a woman was calling out. “Help,” she yelled, “help me, please!” Feeling then that I knew why all of this had happened, I left my backpack and ran out onto the dock. I reached the end and could just barely make her out. There, in a boat, a woman was using a paddle in a frantic attempt to make it to the dock. There was an outboard motor but it had obviously become useless, that or she was incapable of starting it. She was losing to the storm; it was pushing her farther out into the lake and the darkness.

I looked around for something, anything to use to help her. There was a small rowboat tied up to one of the slips. I found oars hidden under the canvas of a nearby motorboat and jumped into the rowboat, attaching the oars to the oarlocks. Then I had another thought. I hopped out and ran back up to the Mustang, leaned in and grabbed the key. Sticking it into the ignition, I turned on the headlights and set the beam on high before running back to the dock. It was easier to see her out there then.

Ten minutes later, I pulled the rowboat alongside her, the rain still pelting down furiously. “Please help me,” she cried, “I ran out of gas. I’ve got to get my husband to the hospital. He’s bleeding badly!” I looked closer and could see she was standing over an unconscious man huddled against a seat in the bottom of the boat.

“Come up to the front,” I called over the rain. “Toss me that rope and I’ll tie it off and row us in.”

She came forward, tossed over the bow rope, and then returned to the guy huddled on the floor of the boat. I set off, pulling as hard as I could against the current and the waves. It took a while to get us back on course towards the dock, but gradually we drew closer. All the way in I was glancing over my shoulder at the lights of the red Mustang, using it as a guide to see where I was going.

As we drew closer the lights shone on her and I saw what I somehow knew I would see. Squinting past me, blinking the rain away from her eyes, was a twenty-something-year-old Grace, with the most determined look in her eyes. Her bright auburn hair was pasted to her forehead, but I recognized her as the girl from behind the mirror.

At the dock, she handed me her keys and said, “Could you please go up there and find our car? It’s a red sports car, a Mustang. Here are the keys … Please bring it back down closer and help me get him out and into it. He’s lost a lot of blood. I put a tourniquet … you know, like they tell you to do … but the cut’s deep … and, and …”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “you take care of him. I’ll get the car.”

He was a big guy, so we struggled getting him out of the rocking boat and up the dock and into the passenger seat. He slumped there against the door and she went around to the driver’s side. The Mustang’s engine idled in the rain. When she saw I was hanging back she said, “Come with me, please. I’ll get in the back. If you could drive, please, it would be …”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” I said, coming around and helping her in. I got into the driver’s seat.

She had slid over in the back seat so she could reach out to her husband. “Just turn right and go out to the highway and then turn north towards Bracebridge. Hurry, please.”

I was having a hard time thinking about Grace being this young and me being this young and how everything was so different from how I knew it had turned out. I drove through the rain and she didn’t ask me my name or how old I was or whether I even had a licence or how I had turned on the lights of the Mustang before I even had the keys. She just kept stroking the head of this unconscious man, murmuring about him not dying and how we would soon be there.

I pulled up to the emergency door and raced in to get someone. When they had rushed him into the back, I stood there alone, not sure what to do next. I went into the men’s and did my best to dry off. That’s when I remembered I had left my duffel back at the landing. I went out into the waiting room and there she was, anxiously staring down the hall and pacing back and forth.

“What’s your name?” she said, looking relieved as she came up to me.

“Jimmy,” I said. “Jimmy Spaulding.”

“Grace,” she said, holding out her hand to me. “Grace … Grace Adler. Sorry, still not used to my married name. It’s only been a week and I’m still getting used to it.”

Not Clark, then? Adler?

“I can’t thank you enough,” she said. “I don’t know what I would have done if … if …”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I hope you don’t mind me asking but …would you wait here with me until they … until he comes out?”

“Sure,” I said.

She had no money with her and I explained how I had none either because all I had was in my duffel back at the landing, but the nurses gave us coffee, so we sat and talked for a while.

She said her husband had sliced open an artery cutting wood at a cabin the two of them had rented down the lake from Pritchard’s Landing. “It was such a stupid accident,” she said. “Ran out of gas. It could have been so bad if you hadn’t been there.” We both stared at our cups and she started crying and talking, babbling to me, some stranger, like she had to tell someone how she had ended up there.

Her family had been against the marriage, she said, so they had married at City Hall. They didn’t want her marrying a Jew, no matter how promising Martin’s legal career was becoming, so the two of them had eloped, had done it on their own and gone off to the cabin for a honeymoon. Martin wanted to look into maybe buying one in the area. “Awful thing to have happen on a honeymoon, don’t you think?” she said, sniffling back tears and wiping her nose with a balled-up Kleenex. She was a beautiful woman, even with wet hair, running makeup, and blotchy skin.

“And how about you?” she said, sipping her coffee. “What’s your story, Jimmy? What were you doing out there?”

I was saved from lying by the nurse coming to take her in to see him, but she turned to me and said, “Don’t you go away now. I want to properly thank you. I can at least see that we get your belongings back to you.”

So I waited. She was in there a long time. Later, a cop showed up and asked the nurse on duty about the report of a man being brought in bleeding. I turned away and faced the wall as he went by. When he was past me I got up and headed out the door. That’s when his partner, waiting outside, collared me.

“Where d’you think you’re going, eh?” he said. “Been looking for you.”

I matched the description they had received earlier of a juvenile wanted for assault up in North Bay.

* * *

Fifty years later, Martin Adler’s funeral was a large affair held at a crazy expensive mansion-like funeral home in downtown Toronto. Sandra and I had to book the cheapest room we could find at the Sheraton. Parking our Civic cost what a meal would go for in a good restaurant in Owen Sound. Couldn’t help feeling like the poor relations among the crowd of financiers and lawyers who milled around after the funeral on the back lawn at the Adlers’ big place in Rosedale. Grace had been insistent, however, so we hung around the edge and sampled the sandwiches and squares, drank our beer and watched the Adler grandchildren skylark around the pool, smiling at them and thinking of our own grandkids.

I was running out of ways to explain who I was and how I was connected to Martin and Grace. I mostly stuck with, “I’m his mechanic. Take care of his cars.” Once I did, most of them would excuse themselves after a moment of politeness to go talk to people who had more money and better, more lucrative jobs than mine. Some of them stayed longer and talked cars while Sandra stood with her arm hooked in mine. I was glad she was there. Toronto always felt strange after spending most of our lives in Owen Sound raising our three kids and running the garage. We didn’t get away a lot.

Then Grace appeared. There was no shyness there. She threw her arms around me and then Sandra, saying, “Thank you so much for coming. I know it must be a trial coming all this way, but Martin and I talked about you in his last few weeks. He asked me to make sure you came.”

“He even planned out the visitors to his own funeral?” Sandy said.

“Well, you know my Martin. Always was one for …” Her voice cracked slightly, and she broke down then. I took her in my arms.

“Oh, James it’s going to be hard,” she said finally, wiping her eyes with what I saw was one of Martin’s monogrammed hankies. “I don’t know what I’ll do without him.”

“If there’s ever anything we can do …” I said, realizing as I said it that the words were what everybody said, but I also knew I genuinely meant it.

“It’s good of you to say so,” she replied, smiling through the tears. “And I intend to hold you to it.”

She had already said she intended to move to the farm they owned in the country outside of Chatsworth, just south of Owen Sound. The house in Toronto was too big. “I’m selling it and settling at the farm. That and the cottage will be enough for me … the kids have their own places now. You’ll visit me, I hope.”

“We always have, haven’t we?” Sandra said, touching her arm. The two women smiled at each other and I was happy that Grace had liked Sandy from the start, when I announced to her and Martin that I had met a girl I wanted to marry. That was nearly forty years and three kids ago.

I had always thought of myself as part son, part family friend, part general gofer, and part handyman to the Adlers. After that first stormy night at Pritchard’s Landing, our lives had intersected in so many ways.