“That would have been the North Stage,” said Seamus, pointing at the map.
Mandy studied the map. The North Stage was there, at least. “I’m so glad.”
“So there is a lot of fact here. There really is a fairgrounds, the locations are all the same.”
“Yes, at least now, in this time, they are.”
“But let me be sure now: what you’ve described so far took place … in 1970?”
She looked down at the snow, feeling so strange, so afraid.
“Come on, now, let’s just work it through. Just show it to me. Go through the process. The point is to get it right out on the table where you can see it, own it, take charge of it. If it’s yours, you can do what you want with it, but as long as you hide from it, it’ll keep chasing you.”
“It was September twelfth, 1970. Joanie and Angie and I were just about to start school again, our sophomore year at NIJC.”
“And this was the same Joanie you met last Friday night?”
“Yes. And she was real. She was forty years older and she remembered all the same things I remembered from when we were growing up, so she had to be the same Joanie I was with that day, so that day had to have happened, right? She was here with me, she and Angie. We were just having fun at the fair, you know? My dad was showing his llamas over in the … well, there’s a camelid building there now but it was another building then …”
They walked down a wide paved walkway spanning an empty field where rows of food booths on each side once formed a village of junk food eateries. “We didn’t want to eat any of the junky stuff, especially Angie …”
They came to the end of the walkway, where two permanent buildings stood in the shadow of the grandstand. “This one here used to be the Spokane Junior League Booth. I bought a basket of chicken here, but Joanie and Angie wanted to get something else, so we were going to meet …”
The North Lawn was still there. The tables were gone, stored away; the trees were bare and gray against the winter sky. Mandy scanned the area first, imagining the tables, the people sitting at them, the crowd noise, and the pleasant heat of a lunchtime sun. The place looked so immensely different in September … of 1970 and 2010. The big honey locust tree was still where she remembered it. She walked through the snow to the thick trunk, touched the bark, and looked around to get her bearings.
“This is the spot,” she said. “This is where I woke up and it was forty years later.”
Seamus came to her side. “Right here?”
“Right here where I’m standing. I sat down and leaned against this tree in 1970, and the next thing I knew”—emotion choked her voice—“I was sitting in the same spot and the tree was bigger and it was 2010.” She steadied herself against the tree and took in the North Lawn, the empty concession buildings, the vacant grandstand. “And I can’t describe the feeling. Like being a little kid who’s lost. You just don’t know what to do.”
She didn’t know what to do now. She’d hoped that if she could go back to where it all started, some clue might reveal itself. Perhaps a feeling would occur, or a vision. Maybe a portal would open that would take her back.
But there was nothing here, only the cold, the quiet, the gloom of winter—in 2011.
“Do you remember what time it was?” Seamus asked.
“There was a clock on the corn dog booth right over there.” The booth was gone; she pointed to where it was on that day. “It was one-oh-five. In 1970. In 2010 the corn dog booth and the clock weren’t there anymore.”
“That would have been Pacific Daylight Time …” Seamus took a pen and marked the location and time on the map. “Anything else? Just bring it out, envision it. Take command.”
She described the people she saw before and after the jump in time and how things changed from one year to the other: the paint on the buildings, the clothing and hair styles, the sudden advent of strange little gadgets such as iPods and cell phones, the funny cultural shifts such as tobacco-free zones and hand-washing stations.
“And none of it was like a dream, you know what I mean? All the memories are of real things. I remember being in 1970 just as clearly, just as real, as looking up and seeing I had nothing but a hospital gown on and it was 2010.”
Standing against a real tree in a real place, both of which confirmed a real memory, she discovered a new resolve and dared to say it to another person for the first time: “I think … I think there is no crazy woman standing here. It was real. All of it. I can’t explain it, but somehow it was real. Everything I’ve seen, everywhere I’ve been, Joanie last week … it’s all real.”
She looked at him for his reaction, but there was no skepticism, no condescension in his eyes. He simply said, “Take hold of it. Own it, whatever it is.”
She nodded and drank in the scene. It was hers. She’d really been here in both the recent and the distant past, and that was all there was to it. As for explanations …
“I need to find Joanie.”
“You can use my car.”
Parmenter’s supersophisticated GPS-and-then-some arrived by FedEx, and Parmenter’s enclosed list of instructions was clear enough. Dane went upstairs, stood in the exact spot where the mysterious vision of Mandy stood, and switched it on. The screen booted up, some numbers scurried across the LCD screen, and then it was ready. He pressed the Function button, then the Waypoint button, and in seconds he had the numbers.
This time he used the pay phone on the outside of a bank in Hayden and wore a hooded jacket.
“Very good, Dane, thank you very much.”
“So what’s this about?”
“Oh, it’s probably nothing. Then again, it could be everything.”
So close, so close to knowing! Mandy’s hands trembled as she paged through the Coeur d’Alene phone book and found the number for Terry and Joanie Lundin—real names, a real number, proof that the couple she met in Vegas a week ago was not illusory—if the same Joanie answered the phone. Oh, Lord, here goes.
The same Joanie answered the phone, and the same Joanie answered Mandy’s knock on her door. Mandy gave her a weak little smile, a face that said, Well, here I am, can’t help it, think you can help me?
Joanie absorbed the sight of her, then stepped out and gave Mandy a sisterly hug. “I don’t know who you are, kid, but any friend of Mandy’s is a friend of mine.”
They went into the quaint old house that Terry inherited from his parents and remodeled. On the hallway wall were pictures of their children and grandchildren. The kitchen was modernized; Joanie had a latte machine and took Mandy’s request for a mocha.
As the machine ground and tamped the beans, Mandy had to marvel. “Wow.”
“You’ve never seen one of these?”
“Oh, I have, but it seems like everybody has one now.”
“Oh, they’re the thing.”
“All we had was one of those little coffeemakers with the paper filters.”
Joanie caught the rich brew in a small cup. “So … you know about computers and cell phones and … ?”
“I got a cell phone. It still amazes me. And computers? Guy,it’s unbelievable!”
Joanie handed her a mocha in a mug.
“Thank you!” It smelled heavenly.
Joanie reflected, smiled, and said, “ Guy!I haven’t said that in years. Where’d we ever get that, anyway?”
Mandy shrugged. “A take off on ‘gosh’ or ‘golly’?”
“Do you …”
Mandy waited.
“Do you remember Mrs. McQuaig?”
Mandy cracked up and imitated how their third-grade teacher would get so involved in finishing a thought she’d run out of air. “… boys and girls, master these tables and they will always be at haaaannnnd …”
Which brought them around to Mrs. Goade, whose head-nodding mannerism was contagious so that the whole class started doing it.