"I think I'll be able to get up in a minute," said Marrity. I wonder if any bars are open yet, he thought. I could use a fast glass of scotch — and then he remembered the old man he had shot and shot and shot, actually less than five minutes ago. I guess a cigarette would do, he thought cautiously. We can get a pack when we find a gas station and a pay phone.
"I should call the college again," he said, just to break the silence, "there's no way I'll be teaching Twain to Modern today. Excuse me, Daph," he added, and he got shakily to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants. "Three days now I won't get paid for."
"And our truck might be stolen," said Daphne, straightening up with Charlotte's help. "But there's still gold in Grammar's shed."
That's right, thought Marrity numbly, our truck. God knows if it's still on that street south of Highland where I left it yesterday morning.
"Well no, Daph," he said. "They took the gold. It was in that van back there, that blew up."
"Oh. So — we're just left with what we're left with?"
"That's it," said Charlotte. Marrity was looking at her, and so she put her sunglasses back on, but not before he had seen a glitter of tears in her eyes. To Marrity she said, "None of us got our new lives. The old you, Lepidopt, Paul Golze, me. 'Nor all your piety nor wit / Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, / Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.'" She ran her fingers through her dark hair. "There's an old letter I guess I'll want you to read for me sometime," she said. "From a, an old boyfriend I — did wrong to."
"Okay," said Marrity. He started forward down the sidewalk, and the other two followed. "At least we still have lives." He breathed in and out deeply, still savoring it.
"And tears," added Daphne, "even if they don't wash away anything."
EPILOGUE: Green Pastures
… to sigh
To th' winds, whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong.
— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST
Juniper and cypress trees, tall and shaggy with age, threw shadows on the flat stones set in rows across Lawn S. The faucets sticking up out of the grass all had signs on them that said Don't Drink This Water, and steel disks set flush with the grass were vases for flowers when lifted out and inverted.
Marrity had been surprised to learn that Grammar had joined the Episcopal church a few years before her death, but it was an Episcopal priest who was now speaking beside her casket at Mountain View Cemetery in Pasadena. A dozen elderly people Marrity didn't know sat under a wheeled green awning near the grave, on folding chairs made more dignified by green velour slipcovers. Marrity and Daphne and Charlotte stood off to the side, with Bennett and Moira.
Strips of livid green AstroTurf were laid around all four sides of the open grave, and Grammar's turquoise fiberglass casket rested on two aluminum bars above the "vault," a copper-painted cement box that the casket would fit into. Marrity had noticed the domed lid of the vault lying on the grass a dozen feet away. The vault itself was suspended in the top of the open grave on steel saddle bars.
At the mortuary on California Street, the priest had given a generic sort of eulogy for Lisa Marrity — "our sister Lisa, loving wife, mother, and grandmother" — and had then played a tape of a woman singing "On Eagles' Wings" on a portable stereo. Now at the graveside he began, inevitably, to recite the Twenty-third Psalm.
Out among the older upright gravestones at the older southwest end of the cemetery, Marrity had seen a solitary walking man pause to look toward the funeral party, and Marrity had thought it might be Bert Malk, but the man had turned and begun trudging away. Marrity had glanced at Charlotte, who would of course have seen the man too, and she had shrugged.
It occurred to Marrity that Malk must have succeeded in taking the body of Marrity's older self away from the El Mirador Medical Plaza yesterday morning. If he had not, and the police had found a dead body with the fingerprints of Francis Thomas Marrity, they would probably have come around to tell the next of kin by now. Bennett and Moira had had plenty of questions this morning, but at least they had not asked why Marrity had been reported dead.
Though still shaky, Moira had recovered from her concussion of the day before, and in the mortuary parking lot she had told Marrity that Bennett had some money to divide with him. Bennett had gruffly said he didn't know how much it would be, after deductions for Sunday's air travel to Shasta, and the cost of the casket and the funeral, and the emergency-room charge. Marrity had just nodded, and gone on giving vague and reassuring answers to their questions about the last three days.
Marrity and Daphne and Charlotte had eaten a vast breakfast at a Denny's in Palm Springs yesterday morning, and then taken a 10:00 A.M. Trailways bus from Palm Springs to San Bernardino. They had walked from the bus station to the street on which Marrity had left his pickup truck, and the truck had still been parked there, and had started up at Marrity's first twist of the key in the ignition. He had been able to feel Daphne's profound, weary relief; he thought he had even caught actual words — home soon.
He knew now why he and Daphne had been experiencing their "psychic link" for the last couple of years, and why it had peaked and synchronized during these last several days, and why they would probably share it for a few more years before it faded away. And he knew why the 2006 version of himself had not had any such link with his version of Daphne.
It had been the moment, yesterday at dawn, when Marrity had projected his astral self out of his bullet-riddled body and then used himself to block Daphne's lifeline from Rascasse. Marrity's disembodied attention — his soul? — and Daphne's had clung together in that timeless non-space, and the connection they had established had extended in both directions, into the past as well as the future.
The old drunk Marrity had never done that, in either of his lifelines.
Daphne had not yet referred to the time line the two of them had climbed away from then — the time line in which Marrity had been killed. Lepidopt had saved Marrity by using the time machine to set the world back just a minute or so, but Marrity and Daphne had been "away" while he had done it, and so they had carried back down to the four-dimensional world the memories of the way it had been before Lepidopt's salvific jump.
Daphne had taken a long shower as soon as Marrity had driven the three of them back to the house, and she had used up all the hot water. But Charlotte, and then Marrity, had showered without caring what the water temperature was. Daphne was pleased to have towels and clean clothes.
Daphne had then slept until sundown, and at dusk Marrity had made a pot of Trader Joe's chili. He and Charlotte had been talking all afternoon, and after the chili the two adults sleepily sat through Mary Poppins as Daphne watched it again, since she had fallen asleep before it had ended on Sunday night. Marrity had felt free to doze during the movie, since Daphne was watching avidly and Charlotte could see it through her eyes if she wanted to.
Then they had all got twelve hours of sleep — Daphne in her own bed, Charlotte in Marrity's bed, and Marrity on the uphill living room couch.
In the morning Daphne wouldn't hear of them missing Grammar's funeral today.
Along with his keys, Marrity had put the crumpled Einstein envelope and the chip from the Chaplin slab into the pockets of his fresh slacks. He had had some idea of tucking them into the casket, but the casket had been closed at the mortuary. Marrity could come back sometime and shallowly bury the things under the grass.