Noiselessly Finch unlocked the door, punched in his identity code on the burglar-alarm keyboard, slipped off his shoes, and tiptoed upstairs. His heart pounded with such startling force that he began to fear real damage to it. At the top of the stairs he paused, paralyzed with shame and misgivings. Leave them alone, he told himself. This is unquestionably the most stupid and reckless and self-defeating thing you’ve done in your life. He was quivering. He did not dare go forward.
“Dale?” Jennifer called from the bedroom. “Dale, is that you? It better be you!”
“Me,” he croaked, and lurched into the room.
She was alone, sitting up in bed, looking frightened and surprised. Finch, ashen and shaking, still had the presence of mind to scan the room for spoor of Nort, an overlooked wristwatch, a stray sock. Nothing. Jennifer was naked. She slept that way with him, but she had once told him that she always wore pajamas when he was away, for warmth. Certainly Nort was still here. Nobody jumps out a second-floor window to escape an angry husband. In the closet? In the bathroom? Under the bed? Finch knew he had created a preposterous farce.
“I felt ill,” he mumbled. “Dizzy—hot flashes—I couldn’t be alone. I just climbed into the car and headed for home—to be with you—the kids—”
“Dale, what’s the matter? What hurts you?” She was as tense and anguished as he was, but she seemed to be recovering her poise. She got out of bed—were those the red imprints of Nort’s fingers on her breasts and thighs?—and pulled on her robe and came to him. “If you were so sick, you shouldn’t have tried to drive all the way from Hartford. Why didn’t you call first? Why didn’t you try to have the motel get you a doctor?” He swayed. His legs felt like concrete. He leaned against her, sniffing for the other man’s cologne or even the smell of his sweat, and let Jennifer ease him down to the bed. He wanted to ask her where she had hidden Nort. But the words would not come. She helped him undress and brought him aspirins, and turned the thermostat up because he was shivering so violently, and clasped him in her arms. Her body was so warm and yielding and tender against him that he nearly began to cry. He let himself relax in her embrace, and to his amazement his desires rose and he reached for her. She tried to quiet him, telling him she was too exhausted for any such thing, but there was no halting him and he took her quickly and with uncharacteristic force. Jennifer met his thrusts with a vigor he had not encountered in months. It must be because Nort’s done all the foreplay for me, he thought bitterly, and came at once, with a sob, and collapsed against her breast. At once he was asleep, and in the morning it all seemed like a dreadful dream, nothing more. Finch insisted on going back to Hartford and making his rounds, and would hear no objection from Jennifer. But first he went into Samantha’s room and, cutting short her expression of surprise at seeing her father return from his trip so soon, asked her bluntly whether Nort had come for dinner the night before.
“Yes,” she said. “He was here when I got home from school. Is he still upstairs with maman?”
Finch asked himself, as he drove shakily back to Hartford, whether to seek the advice of friends, his parents, the local minister, a therapist. He had never done any of that. His life had always been an amiable progression toward deeper happiness. By the time he reached the motel, he knew he would consult no one, would take no action at all, would simply wait and see. He would let Jennifer make the next move.
But she said nothing and he said nothing and after his next trip, a brief one, he found Jason with another strange new toy, an arrangement of gleaming wires that crossed and recrossed and seemed to disappear at one juncture into a baffling uncharted dimension, visible only as a dazzling flicker of green light. Yes, the boy said, Nort had given it to him. Finch felt a surge of frantic anger. He was almost desperate now to bring this thing to some sort of resolution, for it was devouring him. Jennifer remained tender and loving and outwardly unchanged. Finch suffered. He could not push his fears and confusions below the threshold of awareness for more than an hour or two at a time; he was losing weight; everyone commented on his frayed and frazzled appearance. He was drowning in the silent turbulence of his altered life.
A second time he returned prematurely from a sales trip, hoping to catch them together. Again the light was on in the bedroom in the middle of the night. Again he stumbled in to find Jennifer flustered but alone. He explained that he was drunk and bewildered. “I think I’m having some sort of a breakdown,” he told her, and this time he called in sick and took a week off, though the Christmas holidays were coming and it looked very bad to do that now. Impulsively he went with Jennifer to Bermuda for four days, leaving the children with his parents, and it was like a second honeymoon for them, the pink sandy shore, the palm trees. But the moment they came home his mind was full of Nort again. A few days before Christmas he had to go to Pittsburgh for a meeting, but when still at the airport he was consumed with the awareness that Nort was in his house, joking amiably with Jason and Samantha. Grimly Finch boarded his plane, sat in a cold funk of silence all the way and, in Pittsburgh, bought a ticket on the next flight back to JFK. A light snowfall had begun, and his car, sitting in the vast lot, looked dainty and virginal in its thin white mantle. He reached home at midnight. The bedroom light was on. Finch let himself in and took the stairs two at a time. Jennifer was sitting up in bed, naked at least to the waist, her bare breasts blazing at him like beacons, and next to her, relaxed, comfortable, his hands clasped behind his head, was a slender, naked young man, perhaps thirty at most, with cool green eyes and dense red hair that clung to his head in a curious caplike way.
Finch felt a kind of relief. “You’re Nort?”
“Yes. Is time we finally met, I think, Mr. Dale.”
“Mr. Finch. Or Dale.” Nort had some slight accent. Finch said, “I don’t know what the protocol is in a thing like this. I suppose I should be furious and smash things and make threats. But I’m hollow inside by now. I’ve known about this a long time.”
“We know,” Jennifer said. “Why else would you have kept coming here trying to catch us in the middle of the night?”
“Twice,” said Nort. “This be the third. I thought this time I stay and talk with you.”
“You were here the other two times?”
“Certainly. But Jennifer wanted no face-to-face. So when the Dale-detector went off, I did the vanish. You follow?”
Finch stared wearily at his wife. “Jennifer, who is this man and how did he get into our lives?”
“He’s my nephew,” she said.
“You have no—”
“—eleven generations removed.”
“What?”
“A remote descendant in my sister’s line. He comes from A.D. 2215. He’s here to do research.”
Finch thought of the toys Nort had given Jason. His eyes glazed.
Nort said. “I make the field trip, you follow? I do genealogical research, visit the ancestors, family anecdotes. In my era is very important, knowing the history. I have made many journeys over a long span.”
“He has my whole family tree,” said Jennifer. “I never knew it, but I’m descended from Millard Fillmore and Johann Sebastian Bach and possibly John of Gaunt.”
Finch nodded. “That’s fascinating.”
Nort said, “We do not interfere, you know. We move around like spies, doing our studies and never interacting with the past-folk, out of fear of consequences, of course. But this was an exception. I was captivated by Jennifer instantly.”
“Captivated,” said Finch bleakly.
“Captivated, yes. We became lovers. It is a kind of incest, I imagine, but is not very serious, outside the direct maternal line, yes? My studies suffer. Now I come only to this year. Jennifer is a wonderful woman. You know?”