Then he was simply living with Daphne in the trailer, and the life with Amber was a less and less frequent dream. And by April 2006 those dreams had stopped. He was stuck in the drink-fogged trailer life with his angry, drunk, adult daughter — though he could still remember his original life.
Why would my past change, in this way? he wondered. Why did this 1987 Frank Marrity do the tracheotomy yesterday, when in my original time line I did not do it?
It must be that the Harmonic Convergence, that sudden drop in worldwide mind pressure, caused a crack in the continuity, allowed a brief gap — like an unstable seam between two pours of cement — in which some new variable could make things resume in a different way.
So in this skewed history, Marrity did not marry Amber; by the time Daphne was twenty-two, she was a dedicated alcoholic, and so was he; and when she was twenty-seven, in 2002, she took his car keys and he blundered out of the trailer to stand behind the battered Ford Taurus to prevent her from taking it.
He shifted his bad leg now to a new position on Grammar's bedspread. Standing behind the car had been a mistake.
And so he had made a desperate bid to save Daphne, and himself — to start an entirely new life, a Life C, a third roll of the dice.
He had remembered the questions the secret agencies had asked him in both previous lifetimes, and those questions had led him to the discovery of who his great-grandfather had been — and had then led him to the study of quantum mechanics and relativity and Kabbalah. He had stolen some Einstein letters from Grammar's house, which by then had been Moira's.
And then he had actually used the machine in Grammar's Kaleidoscope Shed and jumped back in time and intruded on his thirty-five-year-old self and the twelve-year-old Daphne, and pretended to be his own lost father.
Pretending to be his own father had been even more difficult than he had imagined it would be — claiming to be gay had been much easier than claiming to be that evil old man.
Daphne had noted the resemblance between them: the old and young Frank Marritys! He had hoped that Daphne might survive this time, as the sweet child she had been, if there were no choking and therefore no throat cutting. And he had got his younger self to promise not to go to an Italian restaurant on that fateful day.
And of course he had gone to Alfredo's himself, ready to chase them away if they nevertheless tried to eat there — but when they hadn't arrived at noon, as he clearly remembered doing, nor at 12:30 or 12:40, he had relaxed and sat down and had lunch and a few beers. Fate had evaded him by sending them in an hour late.
And then Daphne choked, and her young father did the tracheotomy.
The old Frank Marrity rolled to a new position on Grammar's bed. He should have… broken Marrity's leg, set his truck on fire, called in a bomb threat to the restaurant.
Last night — it tormented him now to remember it — last night he had been certain that Daphne must have died at the hospital — a hemorrhage, error in anesthetic, a mis-prescription, it didn't matter. The feeling of deliverance had been overwhelming.
He had been sure she had died because he had experienced half an hour of restoration, starting when the three cars had bracketed him on Base Line, and the Rambler had behaved so oddly — for a blessed thirty minutes after that, his right leg was strong and free of pain, and he was healthy, not weakened by years of heavy drinking.
After the incident on Base Line, he had found that he was on another street entirely, but he had got his bearings when he'd come to Highland Avenue, and he had driven to the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital full of bubbling optimism.
He had been ready to begin prepping Marrity for the next nineteen years — marry Amber, bet on the winners in the NFL and NBA and the Stanley Cup, buy stock in Dell and Cisco and Microsoft and Amazon, and get out of it all by 1999 and then put the money in T-bills and insured securities — buy many copies of the first edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, and don't be in New York City on September 11, 2001. To this 1987 Frank Marrity, 9/11 still meant the emergency phone number.
It wouldn't have been precisely the same as the happy life with Amber that the old man remembered, but it should have been acceptably close. And it would have been affluent.
Of course neither of the Marrity-lives the old man had experienced had included a visit from his long-missing "father." And in neither of the remembered lives had the semiblind woman tried to shoot him!
And there were a couple of other discrepancies too between this young Marrity's life and what the old man remembered. In neither of the time lines he had lived through, the happy one or the miserable one, had Grammar's VHS tape burned up. He had been surprised to see the scorched VCR lying in the grass outside Marrity's kitchen door, yesterday morning. And neither Daphne nor this young Marrity should know anything about a connection with Albert Einstein yet; he had not learned of it until 2006. But somehow Frank and Daphne did already know about it.
And why had they been an hour late for lunch yesterday? Urgent housework that couldn't wait?
And then at the hospital he'd seen that Daphne was still alive after all, and decrepitude had fallen onto him again like a waterlogged plaster ceiling. When he had struggled weakly to his feet, Daphne and Marrity had been gone, Daphne's IV tube swinging free and dripping dextrose and sodium chloride onto the floor, and he had had to curse his way past the shouting nurses and limp out of the hospital.
He hoped to be able to find the foreign crowd, the sunglasses girl and her friends, and make a bargain with them — to get them to leave Marrity alone. He could tell them priceless facts about future events, in exchange for that. Even give them Grammar's time machine, for that.
He could try to do that much for his younger self, at least.
Lying on Grammar's bed now, he sniffed — then hiked himself up on his elbows. The raw reek of gasoline was overpowering the scent of the jasmine, and for a breathless instant he thought some recoil effect was pulling him back to the moment of his arrival in the gasoline-fumey Kaleidoscope Shed — with the dozen impossible infants waving their arms in the weeds outside — and then he heard young Frank Marrity's voice through the open window behind his head.
"There's a cigarette in it!" Marrity said.
Then the old man bared his teeth and winced, for twelve-year-old Daphne said, "What, in the gasoline?"
"Right, see, that's the filter, and that's the paper that used to be around it."
"Who'd throw a cigarette in a gas can?"
"Somebody who thought it would set it on fire. I bet she laid a lit cigarette across the open mouth of the can, figuring when it burned down it'd fall in. Which it did. But then it just went out."
"You shouldn't pour it into the dirt. I think that's illegal. Why didn't the cigarette set the gas on fire?"
"The can was nearly full. I guess there wasn't enough vapor. We can't just leave it sitting here; and we can't take it to a gas station for, for whatever the proper disposal is, on a bus." The old man heard the clang of the empty gas can being put down on the concrete of the patio. "I wouldn't have taken bets on it not catching fire, though," Marrity's voice said. "I can see why she thought she had reliably burned down the shed. She must have left too fast to see that it hadn't worked."
The old man in the bedroom shivered in sudden comprehension — if Grammar's makeshift incendiary device had worked, he would have been jumping straight into the middle of an inferno, at noon on Sunday, instead of just into a heady reek of gasoline fumes. Even the fumes had made him scramble out of the shed as fast as he could.