Time After Time (33 page)

I must confess to feeling
as if I have shared no small part of this man's destiny. Had I not
switched the gemstone for the pin before that dinner party, who
knows what might have happened? Our impulsive young artist might,
for example, have had a falling-out with his parents and fled with
Ophelia to Europe. Perhaps I foresaw the tragic accident that was
about to occur to his brother and acted on that knowledge. Yes,
that must have been my motive, I think. It explains

And that was
all.

The writing was crabbed
and ink-blotted. There were no margins. The paper was inferior.
Maybe Victoria St. Onge was working on her last two sheets of
stationery; maybe she was just in one of her moods. Whatever the
case, Liz now had all the pieces to her historical mystery except
one: why was the ghost of Christopher Eastman choosing to appear
to
her?

There was only one way to
find out, she decided, and that was simply to ask him.

He'd shown himself twice
without the benefit of a go- between, so apparently Liz didn't need
a medium or spirit guide or whoever people used to communicate with
the beyond. On the other hand, she didn't have a clue how to
initiate the process herself.
Could
she make contact?

****

Half an hour later, Liz
had set her trap with herself as the cheese. She didn't have a
crystal ball, and she didn't have a Ouija board. She didn't have a
talisman, fairy ring, amulet, dowsing rod, tarot cards, trumpet, or
pendulum. She had no mentor, training, or experience. All she had
was a bedrock belief, deep inside her soul, that she shared a
profound connection with the spirit of Christopher
Eastman.

She'd chosen her bedroom,
the most private of the four rooms in her house, for the
rendezvous. After closing the windows and hooking the shutters,
she'd gone through the house and turned off all the lights. After
that she'd put on a CD of New Age music — in part, to drown out the
moans of the foghorns, which tonight sounded to her like grieving
lovers. The dozen white votive candles that she'd placed around the
bedroom floor and furnishings were flickering softly in their
cut-glass holders, throwing fitful shadows over the muted yellow
walls.

Ready.

She sat in the middle of
her bed with her legs tucked under her and a paisley shawl of red
and gold wrapped around her shoulders. Under the shawl she was
wearing a waltz-length nightgown of white cotton — and a new pair
of underpants, because if something happened and she died of
fright, she wanted to be found properly, modestly
dressed.

Smiling at the bizarreness
of her priorities, she let herself drift off into a state that was
at once unfocused and alert. Solemn thoughts floated before her
like big, wobbly soap bubbles, and then burst, to be followed by
other, sometimes smaller bubbles.

Bit by bit, step by step
...
I am descending into an abyss. A year
ago ...
a month ago ...
I would have been scandalized by this ...
and now ...
will Susy
find a Mickey Mouse hat, I wonder? She'll feel she's let me down if
she doesn
't ...
she's so responsible ...
if she had
brothers and sisters, would she be different? A brat? Like
Caroline? Is a mother more critical to a daughter than a father?
Caroline ...
does she suffer from the
curse of illegitimacy? And what about me? Am I descended from
Ophelia Ryan, or Ophelia Pinhel ... impossible to know ... yes ...
the curse of illegitimacy ...
the curse of
lowered expectations. And yet ...
here I
go, getting my hopes up ...
that he will
show ...
before the candles burn
out.

There was a sound, a
ringing sound, from a great, great distance. Liz considered
answering the summons, but it was so far away ... she was so far
away ... lost in a trance ... lost, and hopeful, and somehow,
despite everything, serene. If only it could always be this way ...
this freedom from want ... from disappointment and yearning ...
this simple, satisfying tranquillity.

The ringing faded away,
replaced by the more heavenly sound of a chimelike note filling the
air around her. It was a sound that by now Liz knew well, the sound
an angel must make when his wings bump against a cloud. The notion
filled Liz with a piercing sense of happiness, more satisfying than
anything she'd known since the birth of her child. A tear rolled
out from under her closed eyelids, and her mouth curved in a smile
of realized bliss.

When she opened her eyes,
he was there, as she knew he would be. He was wearing his painter's
smock, paint-dabbed and worn; the smile on his face was a smile of
pure love. She wondered how she could ever have felt threatened by
his presence; how she could ever have been puzzled by his mission.
He was there, he must be there, to make her understand, once and
for all, about love.

It seemed to her that he
wanted to speak to her. Despite the serene smile, he had an
expression of fierce concentration on his face, as if life and
death depended on his getting it right. He might have been painting
her portrait. But it was more than that: he was coaxing a bit of
her soul from her body, drawing it closer to heaven in a dance of
sheer ecstasy.

In the blink of an eye,
after a lifetime in the dark, Liz suddenly understood the
transforming power of love. It was what made a painting immortal; a
union, sublime. Time could not diminish it, and fate could not
subdue it. Ultimately — eventually — love triumphed ... love
triumphed ... love triumphed.

****

When Liz awoke, she was
amazed to see afternoon sun shining through the shutters and even
more amazed to realize that she had a pounding headache: ecstasy
wasn't supposed to feel that way. She dragged herself into a
sitting position, still wrapped in her shawl, and surveyed the
burned-out candleholders.

My God,
she thought.
I could've
burned the house down.

Was it all a dream? She
couldn't have imagined it. She
had
seen
him — he was there,
as vivid, as real as the oak chest of drawers — and he had imparted
to her some special wisdom, only she wasn't sure what. It had
something to do with ecstasy.

Whatever had happened, it
had taken its toll. Numb with pain, Liz headed straight for the
aspirin. She had her hand on the mirrored door when she remembered
that at four o'clock she was due at the local shelter for battered
women; today was the day she donated her time to entertain the
children there with her puppet show. She ran back to her bedroom
and snatched up the small ticking clock. Four o'clock was. . .
precisely twenty-six minutes away.

"Aaaghh!"

She was out of the house
in less than five minutes, and the funny thing was, the headache
left in a hurry, too. It didn't seem possible that two aspirin
could make such a crushing hangover disappear so fast; Liz was
forced to believe that higher forces were involved.

Did spirits relieve
migraines, too?

****

The shelter, a rambling
Victorian house called Anne's Place, held special significance for
Liz. Her best friend in high school had married a man who beat her
regularly; Liz had talked Marcia into fleeing to the shelter, where
she'd gotten much needed support and counseling. Eventually Marcia
started over in Phoenix, where she and her son were now thriving.
Like Liz, Marcia had become leery of relationships. Unlike Liz, she
was perfectly happy to live without one.

In any case, the warm
feelings that Liz had for Anne's Place remained, and every so often
she showed her appreciation by putting on a little show for the
kids of the women in residence. It was the least she could
do.

She was two acts into a
light-hearted skit featuring Kris and Misha when she spied, through
the peephole, someone who'd seen the play before — most of it,
anyway. With a quirky, endearing smile, Jack waved from the doorway
and then withdrew, leaving the children to enjoy their show in
peace.

Seeing him was a
staggering blow to Liz's presence of mind. After the other night
... after
last
night — well, she needed time to sort it all out. Her
emotions were a mess. She needed time!

The final act was an
embarrassment of missed cues and dropped lines, but Liz's audience
was too starved for joy to care. How glad they were to be able to
laugh and feel safe — all of them, from the two-year-old who kept
making mad dashes at the puppets to the little boy who sat in his
mother's lap and kept his thumb in his mouth the whole time, even
when he smiled.

After the puppets made
their final bows, the children were shepherded away, and Liz began
to break down the theater. She was interested to see that her hands
were shaking as she did it. It wasn't surprising — she hadn't eaten
for twenty-four hours — but she knew that low blood sugar wasn't
the real problem.

One of us has to be
sorry,
she realized.
Why does it have to be me?

Nonetheless, when Jack
walked into the room, her first impulse had been to throw herself
at him and beg for his forgiveness. She wanted him to take her
back. She wanted to be in his arms again, before the anger, before
the hurt.

Was she really so
different from the women at Anne's Place?

"Hello," she said. She
sounded cool and distant, which was the opposite of how she
felt.

"Hi," said Jack in a
surprisingly low-key greeting. It was as if some of the sadness of
the shelter had worn off on both of them.

"How ... did you know I
was here?" Liz asked in a faltering voice.

"The note on your door to
Victoria."

"Oh. Well, her answering
machine's on the fritz. She was supposed to come by—"

"She did come by," Jack
said, "at lunch. She called me afterward, looking for you. Your car
was there, but I guess you'd gone off somewhere on
foot."

"Oh, but I was—" Obviously
Liz had spent the time in a brief but thorough coma. "Yes. I was
out," she said, and then she changed the subject. "How were you
able to get past the front desk?"

Jack grimaced and said, "I
showed her my shipyard ID, and it turns out her second cousin is a
welder there. I had no idea the security was so—"

"—necessary? It is. I have
a friend with the mended bones to prove it."

He nodded thoughtfully. "I
passed a woman. Her face ... it was black and blue — and cut." A
look of pain came over him as he said, "You see it on TV, and it
makes you want to turn away. But even then it's not the same as
seeing it close. She was so
...
battered."

"They don't use the word
loosely around here," Liz said.

"I heard her talking to
another woman about life in the projects. Too much unemployment,
too much stress — it's got to be hard."

Liz wanted to say, "You
think rich men don't slap their wives around, too?" But it seemed
gratuitous, so she settled for saying, "The shelter is a lifeline
for women like her."

He said with a mixture of
candor and bitterness, "My mother, on the other hand, can escape to
Capri."

"You see a similarity?"
Liz said, surprised that he could be that perceptive.

He groped for an
explanation. "I don't know. I guess I see a connection between
physical abuse and emotional abuse. Granted, my father never laid a
hand on my mother or even raised his voice to her," he said
musingly. "But his constant philandering showed such contempt,
caused her such pain. It's a form of abuse, isn't it? Only without
the marks?"

"I see what you mean," Liz
said softly. "Well, since Capri is not an option for these women,
I'm glad there's Anne's Place. It does so much with so
little."

Jack seemed to mull over
what Liz said as she packed away the puppets. "How
does
the shelter get
by?" he said at last, coloring. It was obvious that he thought he
should know.

Liz shrugged and said,
"With a lick and a prayer: donations, mostly. From fund-raisers,
gifts, mailings—"

''I see.''

He was silent another long
moment. "All right," he said matter-of-factly. "Then that's what
we'll do."

Liz looked up from her
carryall. "Excuse me? Do what?"

"Whatever will bring in
the most cash. You're the events coordinator, not me. What do you
think? An auction? A food festival? Maybe a raffle?
Dessert-and-dance? A direct-mailing appeal sounds pretty ho-hum to
me, but—"

"Hold it, hold it!" she
said. His naïveté was mind-boggling. "Number one, I'm not a
fund-raising consultant. And number two — minor detail — the
shelter hasn't asked us."

Jack seemed genuinely
surprised by both objections. "The shipyard will underwrite a chunk
of it," he said, lifting the folded puppet-theater from its table.
"What's not to like? So. Will you do it?"