This Shared Dream (55 page)

“That’s for sure.”

“He and Arabelle had a wonderful time. It was so nice of you to invite them.”

“So which side is he on? Did you tell him what you told me? That you remember the time jump?”

“No.” He was quiet for a long time. Finally he said, “I want to. I’ve tried. I will. Because it’s important not just to you, but, obviously, to a lot of people. But I know he’ll deny everything and be difficult and avoid me for weeks afterward, just like when I used to ask him about Mom. Only worse. Before I met you, I thought I might just be imagining everything, like my past was just a very real dream. I don’t think that most people recall their pasts all that clearly. Try it yourself, day by day.”

“No thanks. Do you think I could ask him about it?”

“I certainly wouldn’t mind if you tried. He might be of some help, but he might not know any more than my mother said he did.”

Jill stared into the room, her anger growing. She could not move. Her body was stiff; her mind was stuck. She had trusted this man. Well, kind of.

No, really.

He looked at her steadily, sitting up now, elbows braced on his knees, his hands folded together and his head resting on top of them, like some kind of solid Buddha, as if he knew everything that was going through her mind.

Then her thoughts raced, as though a tiny chink in a dam had grown huge, and a tumult of feelings rushed through her. Her mind did a wild flip, and her anger flowed out of her. “I understand.”

The lines of his face loosened, moved from tension to deep relief. He let out a breath and bowed his head. “Thank you. Thank you, Jill.”

Whens

FUN WITH TRACY AND ELMORE

July 22

W
HENS DID NOT LIKE
the room he stayed in when he was at his father’s. The color of the wall was like a gloomy day. His mother had helped him pick out the colors of his room at Halcyon House. It was bright yellow and bright red, and he had painted part of it himself, so parts were also a very pretty orange color.

Also, at home—what he thought of as home, though his father was saying now that this would be his home—no one cleaned his room. It was his job, his mother said, and sometimes he did and sometimes he didn’t. Walking into this room was always kind of depressing, because it was always exactly the same, like no one really lived here. No matter what he did, he couldn’t make a dent. The bed was always made, and before he cuddled into it he had to move the fancy pillows and bolsters and pull down a heavy fancy quilt that he was not allowed to do anything on, including color pictures, eat, or drink. By the time he finished with the work of getting his bed ready, he was all woken up.

He was not allowed to leave his room after he was officially put to bed by Lavender Lady, which meant that she came in, pulled the covers up around his neck, kissed him on the cheek, and turned out the light. She had just done all that, and now he was lying here in the big bed with nothing to do but watch the light from car headlights on the street ebb and flow across the ceiling and race across his desk before disappearing.

He wasn’t sleepy. But he had to stay in his room. He wasn’t allowed to wander around the house or go into the kitchen and get something to eat. His father and Lavender Lady were very strict about this. They kept saying that his mother was crazy to let him eat whatever he wanted no matter what time it was. In fact, they often talked about how crazy his mother was, which made him mad.

It made him mad right now.

He rolled off his bed and reached for the light switch, but then stopped. When he turned the light on, Lavender Lady always seemed to know it, and came right away.

It wasn’t very dark anyway. He knelt beside his pack, which rested against his desk. He opened a zipper pocket on one side and poked around. His phone wasn’t there. In the third pocket he opened, his fingers touched the smooth surface of his phone and he pulled it out and called his mother.

She answered right away. “Hi, honey. How are you doing?” She sounded very glad to hear him.

“I hate it here,” he said.

“I know, but your father really loves you and he wants you to stay there with him for a while. Tracy said she had the room specially fixed up for you. It looks really nice, doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“I hope you are being polite about it?”

“I just want to come home.”

“You can’t, not right now. I wish you could. I really miss you. I’m coming to lunch at your school tomorrow.”

“Why can’t I come home?”

“Because of the fire,” she said, but he knew that it wasn’t just that. “There are a lot of people working here now, with saws and things, and it can be kind of dangerous. Are you reading anything fun right now? I’ll bring you some new books tomorrow.”

“Okay. Can you come over now?”

“No, honey. I’ll see you tomorrow. I love you!”

It was not even dark yet and here he was, alone in his room, in his pajamas. He liked to read big books with hardly any pictures, like the grown-ups. Well,
Winnie-the-Pooh
did have some pictures, but not on every page. He wasn’t supposed to read books at night here because it would hurt his eyes—they had taken his flashlight away—and Lavender Lady said that he was too young to read and that it would hurt his brain. He had laughed at that and told them that he couldn’t feel his brain; brains didn’t have feelings. His father and Lavender Lady had then looked at each other with The Look, and his father just said, “Well.”

He went to the window and yanked on the window shade. He was not allowed to open the shade himself because when he did it rolled up all the way to the top,
flap, flap, flap
. This really made Lavender Lady mad. She had to carry his desk chair over and pull it back down perfectly halfway. All the shades in the house had to be that way. Until she went around and pulled them down for the night. There were a lot of strange rules here.

He yanked on the shade, and it went
flap, flap, flap,
and he looked down on the street, with its fat green trees. A few cars drove past, but he couldn’t hear their whooshing sound. Some people were out walking their dogs, and there were even children playing across the street in the park. He couldn’t yell at them because another rule was that the windows had to always be shut because of the air-conditioning. Also, there were alarms on them.

He went to his dresser and got out his old shorts and his old T-shirt, which he’d put back in a corner after his dad threw them in the trash, saying that his mother was dressing him like a ragamuffin and they were too worn out to wear. He liked them. They were soft and cool. He put them on.

He then opened his pack and considered what to put in it. His treasures were few but essential. A smooth swirly stone he’d found in the creek that most certainly was magic. He could feel it. He just didn’t know how to use it yet. He got it out from the bottom of a drawer where it was hidden and plunked it in.

The Hobbit,
which his mother had been reading to him, went in next. It was a bent-up old paperback. He had shiny new books here, all perfect on a shelf, but he had to be very, very careful in handling them and even sit in a special chair and not sprawl on the bed. Lavender Lady had deeply insulted him by telling him not to color in them.

And the checkerboard on which he played with Grandma, which his mother had rescued from the front yard after the fire and given to him.

“Whens, Whens, Whens. My name is Whens,” he chanted in a whisper as he packed. Maybe that was the worst thing here. They refused to call him by his name. They didn’t even know who he was.

Finally, he was packed.

It was a little bit darker outside now. The streetlights were on.

Lavender Lady and his father were watching television in the special theater room right now. He wasn’t allowed to go in because of what might be on the television. The door would be closed.

He put a pillow under the covers to make it look like he was there. He had read about that in a book. He turned off the light in his room and then went down the hallway, past the closed door of the theater room, where there was a loud noise of machine guns, and went down the steep, long stairs.

At the front door, he pushed the button to turn off the alarm, went out onto the front porch, and closed the door quietly behind him.

Sam Dance

July 22

S
AM HAD WANDERED
the same nexus-shot London underground for what seemed weeks, searching for Bette, surfacing occasionally to a London of half buildings and bomb craters, or dull office buildings in the fifties, then trying another dead end. Trying to get back to D.C., 1991, where Jill was in the hospital.

One night, as he slept underground on his bedroll, he awoke to exquisite violin music. Gypsy violin.

He stood and packed his stuff, then tracked the source. Was it a musician in an echoing entrance, one of many who roamed at night, keeping spirits up and playing for food? Maybe.

But it bore a strange resemblance to the music that, for him, had always signaled a nexus—the odd, aural flavor from a distance, or as if he had some kind of neurological disturbance. He walked down the platform, stepping over sleeping Brits, following it as it strengthened and then shifted to—yes!

“White Heat”! But not like any “White Heat” he had ever heard before—which for him, was the stamp of true jazz. Originality. His excitement grew as a train roared down the tunnel.

He got in.

He was just getting settled, and “White Heat” was filling his brain and his entire body, reaching its crescendo, pulling up memories of the Squounch Club, the Perham Downs, the Army reunions during which timestreams merged and he and Wink could meet, when a voice announced that the next stop was Union Station, Washington, D.C.

He picked up a discarded newspaper on the seat next to him. It was 1991. In the blink of an eye, confluent and then congruent with London, 1944, the two timestreams blending then parting, coming in from infinite angles, close enough to touch and step into, from one side and cross to the other, if one knew how, if one’s being was infused with enough of Hadntz’s blend of quantum physics, neurobiology, and … in his case, luck.

He was in an orange, plastic Metro seat. Opposite him, a stylized grid map of the Washington Metro butted against an ad for George Washington University.

Stepping out of the car as soft lights flashed along the platform, he took the up escalator. Ignoring the splendors of Union Station, he headed through it and emerged into the golden light of a late afternoon in full summer, which kindled the impatiens and daylilies in the park across the street to a blaze.

He headed unerringly toward Halcyon House, hoping to find Bette there. When he was only a block away, a familiar figure hurried toward him, waving.

“Sam!”

“Wink?”

He and Wink met, embraced, stepped back. “Well, old man, glad to see you back again,” said Wink.

“Old man, eh? You’re not looking so hot yourself. Is Bette here? I’ve been—”

“She’s not with you?”

“Do you see her?”

“Calm down. I’m sure—”

“Don’t tell me to calm down!”

“She left to look for you last week. But listen to me. Listen! You need to stake out Elmore’s town house in Georgetown. Here’s the address.”

“Elmore’s house? Isn’t Jill there too?”

“No. They’re getting a divorce. She’s here. But your grandson, Stevie, is there. I’ll call you a cab. I’ve been keeping an eye on Halcyon House, and I saw you from way, way down the street. Brian and his family are here now, so I’m heading out to Megan’s.”

“Just tell me what the hell is going on.”

“That Perler Device. Remember? He stole it from us in Mönchengladbach, and then the Russians got it. Somebody here in D.C. has it, and we don’t know exactly who, or where it is.”

“It was no good, though. It didn’t work. It was a failure.”

“That was way back. In another timestream, even. I believe, and Hadntz believes, that it might activate.”

“I got the impression from you that Q was self-healing, incapable of doing wrong, like a new improved God almighty, only better, so if that’s true—”

“The Perler is still a prototype of the original, primitive Device. Hadntz has been looking for it too, and can’t locate it— Look, Sam, she is just exactly one step ahead of this game, that’s all. Even if she’s echoed and magnified through a zillion timestreams and even if she isn’t blindsided by her own humanity,
she is still human
.”

“Okay, so why isn’t this goddamned Q-stuff
fixing
everything?” Sam threw his duffle on the ground and glared at Wink.

“I don’t know. All I know is this: Someone is targeting your family, and I’ve been keeping an eye on all of them for months, and it’s all going haywire, and you need to get your ass over there and watch your grandson, okay? Here’s the cab. Here’s the address. Here’s my Q. Try to call Bette.”

Sam’s heart felt like lead. “Is this all I can do?”

“I think so, right now. Grab something to eat on the way. You look like hell. Here’s some money. But hurry. Something’s going down. I’ll call you soon.”

Sam didn’t stop for food. He watched Washington, a Washington not a whole lot changed from when he’d left, thirteen years earlier, but with the vehicle charging kiosks he’d predicted on every other corner, and tried to forget that he was, after all, seventy-two years old and numbed by everything happening so fast, after so many years of lulling calm.

Sam had just settled himself on a picnic table across from Elmore’s town house, a dressed-down renovation that screamed Money and Good Taste from every understated detail, and was examining the Q device Wink had given him, when the door opened, and a little boy slipped out and closed it ever so carefully.

Whens!

The boy looked around, then hurried down the steps. It was a wonder that the huge pack on his back didn’t pull him over backward.

Sam stood, thrusting the device toward his pocket, not noticing when it missed his pocket and fell out, and left his heavy duffle on the ground.