“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.
He climbed into the car and drove back toward Belltower.
To the hollow central mystery of his life now: Joyce.
He found her on the Post Road, hiking to the little grocery up by the highway.
He stopped the car and opened the passenger door for her. She climbed inside.
By Tom’s calculation she had turned fifty in February of this year. She’d gained some weight, gained some lines, gained some gray. She wore a pair of faded jeans a little too tight around her thighs; a plain yellow sweatshirt; sneakers for the long hike up the road. The marks of time, Tom thought. Her voice was throaty and pitched lower than he remembered it; maybe time or maybe some hard living had done that. Her eyes suggested the latter.
She looked at him cautiously. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back.”
“Neither was I.”
“Still planning on leaving town?”
He nodded.
“I was hoping we could talk.”
“We can talk,” Tom said.
“You haven’t been around much. Well, hell. It must be a shock, seeing me like this.”
It was true, but it sounded terrible. He told her she looked fine. She said, “I look my age, for better or worse. Tom, I lived those twenty-seven years. I know what to expect when I look in the mirror. You woke up expecting something else.”
“You left,” he said. “Left before I had a chance to say goodbye.”
“I left as soon as I knew you’d be all right. You want to know how it went?” She settled into the upholstery and stared into the blue September sky. “I left because I didn’t trust the connection between us. I left because I didn’t want to be a freak of nature, here—or make you into one, there. I left because I was scared and I wanted to go home.
“I left because Ben told me the tunnel would be fixed and the choice I made would have to be the final choice. So— back to Manhattan, back to 1962. You always think you can start again, but it turns out you can’t. Lawrence was dead. That changed things. And I’d been here, I’d had a look at the future. Even just a tiny look, it leaves you different. For instance, you remember Jerry Soderman? Wrote books nobody would publish? He did okay as a trade editor, actually got into print in the seventies—literary novels hardly anybody read, but he was real proud of them. Couple of months after I got back, Jerry tells me he’s gay, he might as well be frank about it. Fine, but the only thought I had was, Hey, Jerry, come 1976 or so you better be careful what you do. I actually phoned him around then, hadn’t talked to him for years. I said, Jerry, there’s a disease going around, here’s how to protect yourself. He said no there’s not and how would you know? Anyhow … Jerry died a couple of years back.” I m sorry, Tom said.
“It’s not your fault, not his fault, not my fault. The point is, I couldn’t leave behind what happened with you and me and this place. I tried! I really did. I tried all the good ways of forgetting. And I lived a life. I was married for five years. Nice guy, bad marriage. I did some professional backup vocals, but that was a bad time …I drank for a while, which kind of screwed up my voice. And, you know, I marched for civil rights and I marched against the war and I marched for clean air. When things leveled out I took a secretarial job at a law firm downtown. Nine to five, steady paycheck, annual vacation, and I’d be there today if I hadn’t quit and bought a ticket west. It’s amazing: for the longest time I promised myself I wouldn’t do it. What was done here was finished. I’d left; I’d made my decision. But I remembered the date on the newspaper I read in your back yard. Every August, I marked the anniversary, if you can call it that. Then, for the last couple of years, I started watching calendars the way you might watch a clock. Watching that date crawl closer. On New Year’s Eve last winter I sat home by myself, one lonely lady approaching the half-century mark. I broke open a bottle of champagne and at midnight I said fuck it, I’m going.
“Bought plane tickets six months in advance. Gave notice. I don’t know what I hoped or expected to find, but I wanted it real bad. Well, the flight was delayed. I missed a connection at O’Hare and had to wait overnight in the airport. When I got to Seattle it was already morning; the newspaper, the one I remembered, was sitting in the boxes staring at me. I rented a car and drove too fast down the coast. Blew out a tire and took a long time changing it. Then I got to Belltower and couldn’t find the house. Couldn’t remember the name of the road. I guess I thought there’d be signs posted: THIS WAY TO THE TIME MACHINE. I asked at a couple of gas stations, looked at a map until I thought my eyes would pop out of my head. Finally I stopped at a little all-night restaurant for coffee and when the waitress came I asked her if she knew anybody named Tom Winter or Cathy Simmons and she said no but there was a Peggy Simmons out along the Post Road and didn’t she have a granddaughter named Cathy? I gave her a twenty and came roaring out here. Caught the bad guy in my headlights and I couldn’t help myself, Tom: after all those years he still looked like death. I remembered Lawrence lying in a cheap coffin in some funeral parlor in Brooklyn, where his parents lived, and it still hurt, all these years later. So I turned the wheel. I was crying when I hit him.”