The scene went to black.
It stayed that way for maybe six seconds.
Then Jim the CNN newscaster came back on, and he was talking to someone off to the right but there was no sound. He shrugged and made a gesture with his arms that said I have no damned idea what’s wrong with Craig, and then the network went to a commercial for SafeLite autoglass repair.
Dave looked at his wife through the screen of cigarette smoke. A little worry line between her eyes seemed to be a mile deep. He was about to ask her if she remembered any of it but of course she didn’t, because if she had she would’ve known that time had been reeled back, they’d been given a second chance, and the Gorgons weren’t coming. Maybe they were trying to get through, and that’s what caused the noise over Bangkok, but they were hitting the protective web the peacekeeper had created. Dave checked his watch. It was 10:17. They weren’t coming, because by this time on that morning of April third, he and Cheryl had been standing here watching the first amateur videos of the Gorgon ships sliding through the blasts, and then Cheryl had said Dear God we’ve got to go get the boys.
Cheryl’s cell chimed. “It’s the school,” she said, and she answered it.
Dave turned to Fox News. “…a little confused here,” said the blonde woman who sat at the desk between the two men. She was holding an earpiece in her ear with one finger, trying to get information and relay it as quickly as possible. “Okay…what we’re getting is…”
“We’ve got to get to the school right now,” Cheryl said. She was already going for her jacket and purse.
“What is it, baby?”
“It’s Mike. That was Mrs. Serling in the office. Mike’s crying, he’s having some kind of fit. He’s begging to come home. Dave, what’s happening?”
Mike remembers, Dave realized. Maybe it’s not all clear to him, but he’s remembering something.
“…dementia going on,” the blonde woman on Fox said. “We’re getting…just a minute…reports of…I’m sorry, I’ve lost that connection.”
“Hold on.” One of the men also was listening through an earpiece. “We’re putting up a crawl, it should be up in just a few seconds. A bit of odd news, I guess.”
“What’s not odd news these days?” asked the other man, and he gave a nervous laugh.
“Not an emergency,” the first man went on, holding up a hand as if to restrain the audience from reaching for their cellphones in a panic. “Reports coming in of…get this, odd news like I said…multiple sonic booms in the sky over Chicago, Atlanta, and New York…well, I didn’t hear anything, did you?”
“Not me,” said the other man. “There’s the crawl.”
Across the bottom of the screen, the words were as the man had already said: Multiple sonic booms reported over several cities, unknown origin.
“I’m getting…what?” The blonde woman was no longer on her earpiece, but was talking to someone off-camera. She returned her attention to the audience, and she was cool and collected when she said, “We’re getting preliminary reports that the sounds—and they’re being identified as sonic booms—have been heard over Moscow and Helsinki. We’ll be getting more details on this later, I’m sure, but we’ll have to let the scientists figure this one out, folks.”
“I’m no scientist but one thing I’m pretty sure of,” said the man who’d given the nervous laugh. He was smiling, and for the moment he was everyone’s good friend and hand-holder. “It’s not the end of the world. We’re going to go to break and then we’re coming right back with investment tips from Doctor Money.”
“Let’s go,” Cheryl urged. “Mike needs us.”
“Yeah,” Dave said. He turned the flatscreen off. Cheryl was alive. The boys were alive. The world was alive, and there were no Gray Men. A rush of emotion almost knocked him down. Cheryl was moving toward the door, in a hurry to go get their younger son. “Yesterday,” he said before she could reach for the doorknob. “What happened yesterday?”
“What? Yesterday? You don’t remember?”
“Tell me.”
She gave him a look now that told him she was really frightened, and that either he was out of his head—unlikely, for such a steady head as his—or that…she didn’t really know, but she thought whatever it was had something to do with that craziness on TV. And that hooking those things together sounded crazy, too. “We got up,” she said in a quiet voice, “I took the boys to school, you cut down the rest of the dead tree, and then you went to work. You said Hank Lockhart’s new porch was going to be an easy project. I talked to Mom about Ann’s insurance settlement from the wreck. UPS brought that package from Amazon about two o’clock.”
“Oh yeah,” he recalled. “The Civil War book.”
“You came home, we had dinner—meatloaf, turnip greens, and mashed potatoes, if you don’t remember my cooking—and then we watched a little TV. You helped Steven with his math homework. About ten o’clock Randall called to ask you to work at the bar this weekend. Then we turned in. It was just a normal day and night.” Her blonde eyebrows went up. “Am I missing anything?”
Dave looked down at the floor of the house he loved. He thought that if he started laughing he might not be able to stop and then it might turn to tears and…oh Christ, what was he going to do with the memories that were becoming clearer and clearer in his mind? He remembered the pain of that spiked arm going into him; he remembered the helpless frustration of being taken from that nightmare world before he was ready, of not being able to see the thing through with the alien timepiece. After that, he didn’t remember anything…but who knew whether he might recall something of being dead or not?
The peacekeeper had said it: Some will know it happened…some will have their memories of this erased.
He wondered how many would remember. One in fifty? One in a hundred, or one in a thousand? Would the President remember, or the First Lady? And how about the unknown boy who had taken the name of Ethan Gaines? Would he ever know what he had been such a crucial part of? How many would recall that they had died, or found gray splotches on their bodies before the agony set in that transformed their flesh and bones? He hoped no one would remember past that point. He hoped the greater power at least was kinder than that. He was sure he would find out, in time.
Time.
It was what Hannah had asked for. Her request in the bed at the White Mansion.
More time.
“Let me hold you for a minute,” Dave said, and he took a few steps and put his arms around Cheryl, and he thought he could squeeze her so hard she could merge right into him, become so close heart-to-heart and soul-to-soul that never for a moment would they ever truly be apart again. He would hug the boys the same way, and they were going to travel and do some things that were fun, things they’d wanted to do and been putting off, because what was the point of getting a second chance if you didn’t use it? He would have a good long talk with Mike, and he would make sure the boy knew those things were not coming back, not ever, and he had the promise of a very special Spacekid that it was so.
“I love you so much,” he told her, and his eyes filled with tears but he didn’t let her see; that would send her way over the edge. He was able to wipe his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket and then he kissed her cheek and her forehead and her lips, her body warm and alive against his, but it was time…time…time to go get their boy.
As they walked to the pickup truck from the house, hand in hand, Dave heard the tolling of a distant church bell. It carried through the bright, clear air. Someone else remembers, he thought. They are telling the world, in their own way. It was not a funereal sound, it was not a sound of sadness or loss or surrender. It was the sound of a new beginning.