“Saved my life,” Tom said.
“Saved your life and drove on down the road and checked into a hotel room and sat on the bed shaking until noon the next day. By which time my younger self had gone home.”
“Then you came back,” Tom said.
“Scared hell out of Doug and Cathy. Ben didn’t seem too surprised, though.”
“You still wanted something.”
“I don’t know what I wanted. I think I wanted to look at you. Just look. Does that make any sense? For most of thirty years I’d been thinking about you. What we were. What we might have been. Whether I should love you or hate you for all this.”
He heard the weariness in her voice. “Any conclusions?”
“No conclusions. Just memory in the flesh. I’m sorry if I freaked you out.”
“I’m the one who should apologize.”
He pulled into the lot in back of the grocery store and parked where a patch of sun came shining through a stand of tall pines. Tom decided this woman was Joyce, unmistakably Joyce despite all the changes; that he had walked into one more miracle, as pitiless and strange as the others.
She squinted at him through a bar of sunlight, smiling. “Catherine said there’s a sale on seed packets here. It’s too late for a garden, obviously, but the seeds stay good if you keep them in a refrigerator.”
“Seeds for Ben to plant? He talked about a garden.”
“For me to plant. I might be staying here. Ben offered me a job.” She paused. “His job.”
Tom turned off the engine, looked at her blankly. “I don’t get it.”
“He’s going home. I think he deserves it, don’t you? He offered me as a replacement. His employers agreed.”
He considered it a moment. “You want this?”
“I think I do. Ben says it’s lonely work. Maybe I need some lonely work for a while.”
“How long a while?”
“Eight years. Then the terminal’s closed for good. There won’t be anything in the basement but Gyproc walls. Weird thought, isn’t it?”
Eight years, Tom thought. 1997. Just shy of the millennium.
“I can do eight years,” she said. “I can hack that.”
“What then? They pension you off?”
“They rebuild me. They make me young.” She shook her head: “No, not young. That’s the wrong word. They make my body young. But I’ll be nearly sixty, no matter what I look like. That might be hard to deal with. My theory is that it shouldn’t matter. On the inside you’re not old or young, you’re just yourself, right? I won’t be a callow youth but I won’t be something monstrous, either. At least that’s what I believe.”
She had been Joyce, would be Joyce, was Joyce now. “I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
“It’s funny,” she said. “We were together for what—ten weeks, eleven weeks? It’s funny how a couple of months can put such a spin on a whole life. Now I’m old, you’re young. In a few years it’ll be the other way around.”
He took her hand. He pictured himself coming back here in seven years’ time, knocking on the door, Joyce answering—
She put a finger on his lips. “Don’t talk about it. Live your life. See what happens.”
So he helped her with the shopping and he drove her home.
During the ride she asked Tom what he meant to do now and he told her more or less what he’d told Tony and Barbara: head east, live on the house money for a while, sort himself out.
He added, “I keep thinking about what Barbara’s doing. I can’t see myself carrying a picket sign around some toxic waste dump. But maybe I should, I don’t know. I think about what Ben said, that the future is always unpredictable. Maybe we don’t have to end up with the kind of world that created, you know, him—”
“Billy,” Joyce said. “Ben said his name was Billy.”
“Maybe we tan uncreate Billy.” Tom pulled into the gravel driveway of this plain house, ugly but well maintained, this lonely house up along the Post Road. “But that’s a paradox, isn’t it? If Billy doesn’t exist, where did he come from?”
“Wherever ghosts come from,” Joyce said.
“Hard to believe a ghost could be that dangerous.”
“Ghosts are always dangerous. You should have figured that out.”
She touched his cheek with her hand, then opened the door and stepped outside. Tom made himself smile. He wanted her to remember him smiling.
Driving east, he discovered a package of seeds in the passenger seat where it must have fallen from her shopping: morning glories, Heavenly Blue.
Epilogue
Billy remembered a sense of upward motion, of expansion, as if he were being drawn into a vacuum. The motion surrounded him, became a place, incomprehensibly large, a blue vastness like the sky. And then it was the sky.
A blue sky generous over a dry landscape, powder-white hills in the far distance and in the foreground a farm. Water arced up from a thousand sprinkler-heads, made rainbows over miles of kale and new green wheat and luxurious arbors of grapes.
Ohio!
Billy was astonished.
He stood on a dusty road in civilian clothes. His body wasn’t broken. No more pain, no more fear.
A road in Ohio inside a monster inside a tunnel inside time.
He couldn’t make sense of this hierarchy of impossibilities. He had been carried here by wish or accident, perhaps by some being altogether timeless, human or not human or human in one of its aspects or all humanity collated together at the end of duration—he didn’t know; it didn’t matter. He wondered what he would do without his armor, but the thought was less terrifying than it should have been. Maybe he didn’t need the armor. He reached under his rough-woven cotton shirt and touched the place where the lancet had entered his skin; but the hole was seamlessly healed.
Billy walked toward the farm until the common buildings loomed ahead of him and he distinguished two figures at the main gate. Now he hurried forward, recognizing the bearded man: Nathan, his father; and the woman beside him was Maria, his mother, who had died of cancer a month after Billy was born; he recognized her from her photographs.
He stood before Nathan, who was as tall as Billy remembered him. Billy said, “What is this place?” And Nathan answered, “This is where we begin again.” Then he opened his arms and Billy ran forward.
Nathan and Maria took him home. Their touch pulled memory out of him like a throbbing tooth until there was only the fact of the sky, the water, the heat.
“Saw an Infantry patrol this morning,” Nathan remarked, “but it passed well to the south.”
“That’s good,” Billy’s mother said.
Billy took her hand and tugged her toward home.
“I’m tired,” he said. The sun was hot and made him tired and he felt like he’d walked a very long way.