Here is the continuation of Time and Time Again by Bonnie Grove (for the first two chapters click here). Feel free to share this link, or to refer to/copy to this work on your blog--simply link back to Fiction Matters and be sure to list me as the author.
Chapter 3
Gwen
“Sit down.” Brad doesn’t look
up from his computer screen. I close his office door behind me, hiding a smile.
It has been only a few hours since the debriefing about the time traveler, and
Brad has given in already. He called me to his office moments ago to discuss my
“interests in the new patient”.
I sit in one of the two compact
leather chairs in front of his desk, cross my legs and swing my foot back and
forth, slow as a metronome. I’m the picture of practiced indifference, but my
stomach quivers. Brad is blandly good looking. A one-time quarterback now
washed out from too many hours indoors behind a desk, softened by too many
quickly eaten meals. His hair is neither blond nor brown, and when he bends his
head down, I see it’s thinning on top.
He looks up and watches my
low-heeled black pump tick off the seconds. I’d dug the shoes out from behind
my desk before I’d come. They are hardly red carpet glamour, but set against
the institutional environment of The Center, they’re darn right sexy. The look
in Brad’s eyes tells me they’ve accomplished their task. In the four years I’d
been working at The Center, I’ve seen that particular greedy expression on his
face millions of times, although it’s rare for him to focus his gaze on my
foot. I melt back in my chair, casual as an old friend.
Brad glances at the door behind
me, mouth open, as if expecting an intruder to enter the room the moment he
speaks. “Gwen, I want you to know about some recent developments in the time
traveler’s case.”
I sit straight, my spine a
soldier at attention. I knew he wouldn’t
leave me out.
He says, “I’ve called in Dr. Svenson.”
My eyes widen, the only indication I’ve heard him, the only record of my shock.
Brad taps his middle finger on a short stack of papers on the desk in front of
him, his look grim. I understand the gesture. There’s an old glitch in my
paperwork, my dissertation, or rather, the lack of one. I haven’t handed it in,
haven’t defended, and therefore still do not possess my doctorate. It’s an
oversight, a technicality I’ll rectify when I can make the time. Besides, I’ve
been head of The Center’s psychology department for nearly two years after the
sudden departure of Dr. Ahmed. I’ve been doctor enough for that position, why isn’t
that enough for Brad today? For the time traveler?
The look on Brad’s face tells
me not only is he calling in Dr. Svenson, but I’m being cut out completely. Dr.
Svenson, internationally known expert in hypnosis and psychotherapy, and world
class blow-hard, will work with the time traveler. Not me. Brad continues, “Dr.
Svenson is a logical choice given his vast knowledge and expertise.”
I glare at the floor so Brad
can’t read the contempt in my eyes. Svenson has expertise in time travelers? Are
you kidding? “Brad,” I say, forcing myself to look him in the eye. “I’m happy
to work under Dr. Svenson.” A tactical statement. I have no intention of working in any
capacity with the Norwegian pop-tart. But negotiations begin in middle ground.
When he doesn’t answer, I press, “I’d be honored.”
He gets up and stares out the
window, his back to me. The sun streams in, but I don’t feel its warmth. He
says, “He’s gone.”
The seconds count off, one,
two, three. I say, “You mean—“
His face is turned away. “The
time traveler. He disappeared a little over an hour ago.” He snaps his fingers,
indicating a flash of time.
I feel the finger snap in my
spine. He traveled. I’d give anything
to have seen it happen, to have been there. “How does it work? I mean, will he return?”
He looks up, as if the sky or
the old growth forest that surrounds The Center might have the answers. “We
don’t know. He wasn’t here long enough for us to fully assess him. He wasn’t
exactly—” Brad pauses, then says—“Calm.”
Score one for the rumor mill. A
jolt in my stomach. We are sitting here, discussing a time traveler. For a
moment I feel the urge to laugh. Instead, I say. “Brad, look at me.”
He doesn’t move. I’m losing
this argument – not something I’m accustomed to. I glance down at my elegant
shoes. Should I get up and stand with Brad at the window? Stoke his ego? Admire
aloud the breathtaking view and ingenuity it took to build this vast, modern
complex in the middle of protected land? Maybe touch his shoulder, or smooth
the back of his suit jacket? I’m more than aware of his attraction to me.
But I do none of those things.
Instead I say, “You called in Svenson. You must think the time traveler will return….”
He turns and the look on his
face startles me. Some powerful emotion pulses behind his eyes, his gaze pins
me to my seat. “Obviously, we hope so. But who knows? If he does return,
Svenson will take the case.” His flattened tone belies his intense expression.
“Help me understand your decision, Brad.” .
He sits behind his desk and leans
forward, chin on chest, like a doctor about to deliver news of inoperable
cancer. “You should have seen it, Gwen. Watching him fight off four security
guards.”
Damn right I should have seen it. Unconsciously, I lean toward him, not wanting to miss a
word.
“He broke a guard’s arm.” Brad
says, voice as low as a lover’s.
I’m a child at the campfire,
letting the story wash over me. I ask no questions, I only listen, balled fists
in lap, bursting with intrigue. I want to crawl inside Brad’s mind, see his
memories. There’s something about the time traveler. It’s more than
professional pride. I feel pulled to him in a way I’ve never experience with my
patients. He brushes against my mind like a phantom memory.
Brad puts a finger to his lips,
face puckered in concentration. “Watching him disappear – astonishing. Solid
and real as anything, then gone,” He pauses.
I push myself to the edge of
the chair and lean on the desk. He looks at me as if for the first time, as if
he’d forgotten who he was talking to. “But what fascinated me most, Gwen, was
what he said as he disappeared.” Brad’s muddy eyes flicker over me like a
tongue. “He was calling your name.”
Chapter 4
Morris
You can’t change the past.
People wonder about that when they play “let’s pretend” games about time
travel. They ask, ‘what would you change if you could go back in time and
relive high school?’ They speculate how, because you are there – a future you
in a past event – you can successfully change what happened. Nonsense. Nothing changes. Nothing important anyway.
You can’t change the past. The past changes you.
I’m visiting a key moment in my
past right now. I’ve traveled from The Center, where I have been for the last
four days, and am visiting myself at age ten. We’re in his bedroom; me lying on
the bed, hands behind my head, waiting for him to stop feeling sorry for
himself. Actually, it will be years before he stops the self-pity. Before he realizes
the time travel, unlike growing pains or puberty, won’t go away. And years more
until he accepts it – how many I don’t know because it hasn’t happened yet. At
age thirty-four, I sometimes still believe
this is a cosmic joke, trickery. Something God could easily change His mind
about.
“It’s true?” he says, not
looking at me. His voice quakes a little with unshed tears.
“’Fraid so.” I close my eyes
and think about the comfort I cannot offer him. All he wants is for me to tell
him he’s normal. At age ten he has had only one or two brief time travel
experiences. So brief, so shocking, he can still deny their reality. He wonders
if all he needs is a pair of glasses to help stop the episodes of double
vision. Maybe a doctor could prescribe something to manage the weird feeling of
being present, absent, and present all at once. He tells himself what has
happened to him has not happened at all. My arrival has shattered all that –
and more.
I lie still, let him take me
in— himself as a man. This is the first time his future has folded in on
itself. He looks like he might start crying, and for a moment I’m tempted to
take it personally. I recall feeling let down that my adult self wasn’t
handsome, or heroic. That I’d look so ordinary. He is being forced to pack away
any number of dreams about his what-might-be. After a long moment, I say,
“You’ll have to take up soccer.”
He pouts. “I hate soccer.”
Age ten was not my best year.
He is short and slightly overweight, homage to his love of reading and the
habit of his classmates to choose him last for any sports team. Parcels of baby
fat cling to his cheeks and his belly pushes against his oversized T-shirt. In
my time, I’m too thin to even be fashionable. I say, “I know. But you won’t
make the track team until high school, and you need to learn to run now.”
“Why?”
I sit up. “It helps.”
“Helps what?”
I sigh. Was I ever this dense?
Or maybe my practiced self-editing is too circumspect for him. He’s so young. I
barely recall being him – this child. Time travel grows you up fast. “You need
to be in good shape when you travel. I spend a great deal of time running.” Either
toward something, or from something. I’m always running on the treadmill of
time.
He’ll understand soon enough.
He’ll stop reading C.S. Lewis’s fiction, and will pick up his apologias. Later,
he will discover Kant, Barth, and Augustine. When puberty hits the time travel
will increase and he’ll focus his efforts on trying to remain in his own time.
He’ll believe he can prevent himself traveling when he kisses a girl for the
first time, or attends a party where the music blares and people dance, or when
he tries out for the track team, running so hard his heart feels like it will
explode. He’ll be wrong.
He pulls at his hands and fingers.
“What happens to me?”
“Many things, but the important
part is you’re fine. You’ll be okay.” This feels like a lie, but in many
respects it is absolute truth. I’m healthy, apart from headaches. He will
survive school by dropping out in grade twelve when the time travels become
more frequent and last longer. He will move away and carve out a life in the
best place to remain hidden – the world of the working poor. No one notices
you, no employer is surprised when you don’t show up for your shift, no landlord
raises an eyebrow when you open the door, bruised and staggering and tell him
you don’t have his rent money. He will not be happy, but he will be okay.
He nods, but frowns. He doesn’t
want to know he’ll get though it. He wants me to tell him it will stop, that
he’s normal, will be normal in the future. It’s the same desire that kicks at
me even now. Even in the midst of the tests and my distrust of The Center. I’m
a ten-year-old boy still hoping.
“You like to read, right ?”
“Yeah. Sorta.” He won’t look at
me. He hates to admit his passion for reading to anyone, even himself. He knows
he’s expected to love baseball and violent movies. But he doesn’t. He loves
books.
“Mom’s family bible is in the
basement.”
“Okay,” he says, uninterested.
“Go get it tomorrow morning.
Bring it up here and start reading.” I remember the day I found Mom’s forgotten
bible. I started reading Job and thought it must be some sort of joke, a mere
stage play. I left Job to his whirlwind and flipped the pages, landing at Song
of Solomon. That got my attention. And I kept reading from there.
“Why?” he says.
“Because.” My vision blurs.
“God is too big to leave out of the equation. I’m leaving now. You hang on. .
.” my voice trails off. I grope for a last scrap of comfort to offer him. “Hang
on,” I say again, but I am gone and am back in my room at The Center. The blank
walls. The locked door. How did I end up here?
***
After my future self left my
apartment with Greg, I sat thinking in the dark for a long time. Then I got up
and went for a walk. I walked all night and into the next morning, stopping
only for coffee. I walked all afternoon and by the time the sun was setting I
had walked out of town and right up to the doors of The Center – a place I’d
never been before, yet somehow knew how to find. I walked in the front doors
and said to the receptionist, “I’m Morris Semper. You might be looking for me.”
You can’t change the past.
Chapter 5
Gwen
Bernie is crying. Big grey head
in his hands, he sobs like a lost child. In a way, that’s exactly what he is. He’s
sixty-seven years old, but he doesn’t know it – age is meaningless to him. A
stroke took away most of his memory and nearly all of his self-understanding.
I stand in the doorway and take
him in for a beat, then glare at the two nurses who have been trying to ready
Bernie for today’s tests. One of them, Franco, a young man with the bedside
manner of a sociopath, holds three wires in his hand. These are connected to
the electrodes he’s been trying to stick on Bernie’s forehead. Seems Bernie has
other plans.
Franco sees me and crosses his
arms, defensive. “He’s been fighting us for twenty-minutes.” He glances at the
other nurse, a pretty, round-faced girl who looks like she belongs in high
school, or working at Blockbuster. Her eyes flitter around the room, focusing
on nothing. Happily, she does not speak.
Tense and distracted by my
conversation with Brad about the time traveler, I simply take the electrodes
from Franco’s hand. “Please leave.” I point to the door. “He is a person,
Franco, not a machine,” I say, my teeth grinding together. “You can’t force
him. We’ve discussed this.”
“But we’re implementing
pre-test protocols,” he says, exchanging a look with the other nurse. “We have
to gather this data on him before he goes to physiology.”
Franco thinks I’m soft on
protocol. He never fails to point out each time he believes I’ve bent the rules
to suit a patient’s mood. When I tell him the comfort of the patient matters
more than the tests, he narrows his eyes in an attempt to keep from rolling
them at me. A lecture about treating patients with courtesy and dignity pushes
at my lips, but I hold it back. “How much useful data will phys get from an
uncooperative subject?”
Franco doesn’t answer. The
other nurse hands me several more wires and heads for the door.
Franco hesitates, eyes flicker
to the security camera staring from the far end of the room, then follows the
girl out. “I don’t need you to tell me how this department works,” I tell the
closed door.
I turn to Bernie, run my hand
across his shoulder and arm. “Shh, shh”
“Stop?” he says between sobs.
“Yes. They’ve stopped. I sent
them away.”
Bernie lifts his head, points
at the expensive, state of the art portable EEG machine. “Stop.” His face
shines with tears. Big Bernie. Retired construction worker who, before the
stroke, was divorced from his third wife and facing charges of assault stemming
from an incident between him and his second ex-wife’s new boyfriend. Flash
temper, his medical history chart says, but a brain bleed changed all that.
After recovering from the initial stroke, everyone was amazed to discover that
the Bernie they knew—foul tempered, foul mouthed, self-centered—had
disappeared. But that isn’t what brought him to The Center. What brought him
here is far more remarkable.
I help Bernie down from the
exam table and the moment his feet touch the floor he wraps his arms around me.
“Tanks. Stop. Tanks.”
I pat his back. The stroke has
done nothing to diminish his remarkable strength. If he wanted to, he could knock
me over with a swipe of his paw. “You’re welcome, Bernie. You stop crying,
okay?”
He nods, and wipes his nose on
the sleeve of his sweater. He shuffles out the door. I know where he’s going
and I follow. Dr. Aatoon Ahmed taught me the best way to get a patient to work
with you and eventually follow protocol is to learn to work with the patient –
the opposite of what Franco had been doing. I’ve spent the better part of six
months trying to understand Bernie’s routine, his wants, his mind. I’m patient.
You can’t force answers from a damaged brain, you coax, wait, notice
everything. In time, the secrets reveal themselves. Bernie is about to reveal
some now.
He enters the playroom- which
is actually an observation room, where we can view patients as they interact
with any number of play items like games, puzzles, books, toys, and a beautiful
upright piano. A large mirror takes up half the far wall. It’s a two way mirror
where we can observe without influencing what happens in the room. I glance at
my reflection. I look tense, unhappy.
Bernie sits at the piano and
begins to play. His hands—chunks of meat shaped like concrete blocks—coax such
glory from the instrument that I feel it in my spine, like always.
Eyes closed, now oblivious to
my presence, he pulls notes of lament and desire from some hidden place inside the
piano. The room fills with the sound of his regret, of everything he has left
undone. The ache fills my body; notes of unfinished hope flood me. Unlike
Bernie, I can’t name my regrets, am not even aware of them, until Bernie plays
slow and dark and I feel them well up like a near-breaking wave.
I sit beside him on the bench
and place my narrow hand over one of his. “Got anything happy inside you today,
Bernie?”
Bernie startles and stops
playing. He pouts at the keyboard, upset with me for interrupting.
I nudge him gently. “What about
something happy?”
He nudges me back, grins, and
digs in. His new song is a peppy jig. I’m amazed how easy it is to change a
patient’s mood, just like Aatoon showed me.
Aatoon taught by example. Shortly
after I started working here, her future-telling patient David flew into a
rage. I was in her office with her when she got the call from the nurse
observing David. She turned to me and said, “Come with me. You’ll learn something
valuable today.”
The scene that met us was
chaos. David screamed and flailed while several staff worked to restrain him.
Dr. Ahmed spoke a single word, not to David, but to the men holding him down, “Stop,”
and then waved them off the boy. She pulled an iPod from her pocket and hit
play. The song ‘Candy Man and Salty Dog’ filled the room. “Let’s sing, David,”
she said. The boy’s guttural moans continued unabated, but he wasn’t kicking,
wasn’t flailing anymore. Now he fixated
on the iPod.
Two
old maids sittin’ in the sand
One
were a she
The
other were a man
Salty dog, candy man
Aatoon sang along, the boy
grunted, and when the song finished, David reached for the iPod and hit replay.
As Aatoon walked beside him to his room, she said to me, “When a patient’s
behavior becomes difficult, too many so-called professionals think brute force
is the answer.” We left him in his room sitting near the window, happily
grunting along with the child’s tune. She said, “But subduing is much more
effective. It isn’t controlling the patient.” Her accent was slight, often
undetectable, except when she was passionate about the subject. Now, her voice
lilted, chattered. She spoke quickly, “It is helping the patient control
himself.”
And Bernie at the piano now is
proof of that statement. A nudge, a question and I had helped guide his
emotions, but he is the one now in control of himself. His eyes are closed again,
his mouth goes slack, and I know he is in theta waves. I don’t always need a
machine to read Bernie’s remarkable brain wave activity. Like a small child, he
spends most of his time in the twilight of theta waves, his imagination
disconnected from reality.
“Where’d you learn to play,
Bernie? Who taught you?” I say, knowing what he will answer.
He keeps his eyes closed. “God,”
he says, the word thick. He has trouble forming sounds, but the effort of
speaking doesn’t cause him to stumble or pause his playing. “God taught.”
A stroke is no cause to sing
praises to God, but for Bernie, his stroke came as close to a religious
experience as he’d ever encountered. It transformed his personality, robbed his
memory of past evils, and bestowed upon him the gift of music. Before his
stroke, Bernie didn’t listen to the radio never mind play an instrument. Now,
he lives to play piano. His god is in his head.
“Will you let me put the cap on
you?” I say. Sometimes, when he reacts against the individual electrodes, like
he did with Franco and the other nurse, he will allow us to use the cap—a
shower cap type device with electrodes built into it—over his head while he
plays. It isn’t as accurate, and he won’t wear it long because it makes his
head sweat, but it is better than nothing. And now that he is calm, I hope to
he will consent.
His fingers continue to fly.
“Nope,” he says, his attention on the piano. “Nope, nope, nope.” He refuses in
tempo.
I can’t help but smile. Bernie
is a Mack truck, and there is no explaining pre-test protocol with a Mack
truck.
Bernie’s tune changes, swells
into a melancholy song that sweeps up the room. The notes paint a picture of
some idyllic pasture, soft, green, a home he’s never seen. He is crying again,
great tears rolling down meaty cheeks, the sounds his hand produce speak the
words he no longer can. I sit still, watching his hands, feeling the miracle of
it and am nearly tempted to pray to Bernie’s God of the stroke. How can trauma
to the brain produce such poignant order? But after a few minutes, I can
actually hear those words –they’re a question. Where is my love? Where is my
lover?
The words, I realize, are not
Bernie’s, but my own, they pour from my mind, filling in the ache that the
music leaves.
He called your name.
Something wrenches inside my
chest, and I get up from the bench and walk to the door. I‘m overwhelmed with
the need to get away from the music and the thoughts it invokes in me. Bernie
will be safe here alone with his hollowed out regrets. He’ll play until he
wants to sleep.
I’m nearly out of the room when
the music stops.
“Sad,” Bernie says, not looking
at me.
I turn to him. “Yes,” I say to
his back. My voice is soft but even. “You’re feeling sad today.”
He swings his legs high to
clear the bench and turns to face me. “You sad.” He points at me. “Piano says.”
I can’t help but ask the
clarifying question, “Do you mean you think I am sad?”
Bernie nods, tuffs of grey hair
bob up and down. “Piano says.” He picks his legs up again and swings them to
face the piano. The room fills with the same cloying song.
I retreat to my office, and
slam the door far harder than I intended. Bernie’s case is complicated enough
to study and document without adding delusions to the mix. Bernie has always
used the piano to speak for him, he has never before indicated the piano speaks
to him. More than that, it might signal I’ve missed something important in his
gifting diagnosis.
And the piano was talking about
me.
I sit at my desk and pull
Bernie’s case file up on my computer, but hesitate. The cursor flashes, but my
thoughts jumble and I can’t think straight. I get up and look out the window. The
psychology pod of The Center is on the third floor at the back of the complex.
The view from my window is lovely. To my right, there’s a patch of forest that
goes for miles. To the left, more trees, but they break in the distance,
revealing the grassy common area that travels south to meet the river.
Dominating the view is a massive, gnarled and knotted tree that rises out of
the forest like a giant. It looks as if it spent most of it’s ancient life
carrying water on it’s back. Huge arthritic limbs twist upward to the sky, then
at a knuckle change direction and grow straight down toward the ground. In the
spring, the leaves bud the tenderest green, and in winter the wind sweeps it
bare, reveling the swollen, distorted branches. It’s March. Spring is still a
promise, and the bare tree shivers in the wind. I think of this tree as one
belonging to the selfish giant who came to love the children who breeched his
wall and played among the branches. Bent and distorted by time and the elements,
it is oddly welcoming.
Where is my love? Where is my lover?
He called your name.
Why my name? Who is this man?
How could he know me? I pull my thoughts around me. It’s useless to moon over a
song. I check the wall clock, well after noon. I’ll eat first, maybe under the
tree, and deal with patient files when I can get my head together.
***
I’m in the belly of the Whale.
The cafeteria is in the first basement of The Center. The second basement,
directly below the where I am standing with tray in hand, is the morgue. The
Center’s complex blueprint consists of separate pods connected by shared halls
and elevators. Each pod focuses on a different discipline of science, studying
a specific aspect of human life. This means parts of The Center run much like a
hospital, and all hospitals require a morgue. In my department we don’t deal
with physical disease. When our patients require medical intervention or
testing, we send them to the appropriate pod to be healed, or, in the cases of
extreme age or illness, to die. I don’t think about it.
Except for days like today,
when I’m standing in line waiting to pay for a wilting cafeteria salad, and a
shiver up my back reminds me I’m standing on temporary graves. It’s as if the
cold floor soaks up mortality from the room below.
I pay for my food and look for
where to deposit my tray. Stepping right while looking left, I run into a
sour-faced man. My tray flips up and the salad lands on my chest and the bottle
of water spins off behind me. I pull the tray back and the salad drops to the
floor.
“Oh my,” the man says. But he’s
not only referring to the mess. I’m used to this reaction, so I wave him away,
but he stoops and picks up a handful of arugula and a few stray carrots.
I step away from him a couple
of paces. “I’m sure they have staff who deal with these things.” I look around
and sure enough, a dark haired woman in a white apron trots toward us, broom in
hand. She appears obscenely cheerful for someone about to employ broom and dustpan
to a ruined lunch. Up close, she is much younger than I thought, and very pretty
– in spite of the hair net which holds her dark, nearly black hair in place.
She holds out her hands to the man and he deposits the vegetables into her
hands. Several pieces flop to the floor. The woman keeps smiling, patient and
amused. “Thanks. I’ll clean it up.”
The man looks up at me, “I’m
sorry.”
“These things happen,” I say, flashing
an imitation of the young woman’s smile. “Let me help you,” I say to the woman.
Both of us pretend not to notice when the man slinks away.
The young woman beams at me.
“You have quite an effect on people.” She holds up the salad bowl.
I smile and go hunting for my
lost bottle of water. I don’t need to be reminded of my looks. I know all about
my blonde hair and oval face and wide set green eyes. Cat-like, I’ve been told.
Who cares? I’d rather be taken seriously. Men would rather ogle me than listen
to anything I have to say. Once, at a staff meeting, a doctor who conducts stem
cell research commented on something I had said by saying, “That was actually
an intelligent thought, Gwen.” He spoke in that slow, delighted way one uses to
speak to a child. I hate being treated like a kitten playing with an oversized
ball of yarn. Look, Gwen is thinking about big things – isn’t that cute?
The cafeteria woman gathers the
remaining ruins of my lunch and piles it on the tray.
“Thank you,” I say.
“It’s no bother.” She points to
the glass cooler filled with sandwiches and salads. “You can take a replacement
salad. No extra charge.”
I eye the puckered cherry
tomato rolling around the edge of the tray. “You know what? I’ll pass.”
She laughs, and nudges my arm –
an absurdly chummy gesture, but somehow I don’t mind. She stands close to me; a
savory aroma clings to her, as if she’s recently returned from India with a
shipment of spices. She says, “I don’t blame you. I never eat this food.” She motions
me to follow her. “If you want something good for lunch, come with me.” She
jerks her head toward the kitchen and walks away.
I’m hungry and curious, so I
follow.
The kitchen air is soggy from
heat and steam. A small team of aproned workers- all women- roll around each
other as they add dashes of salt, sweep onions from a grill, or pull metal
bowls from an overhead shelf.
I stand beside my newfound
friend in front of a huge grill, and watch as she pours fresh veggies -broccoli,
sugar snap peas, bean sprouts and carrots-onto the grill. They sizzle and pop.
I stand silently and watch as she adds cubes of chicken and an array of spices.
Within minutes, she’s layering the food over a plate of steaming noodles. The
aroma is heaven. “I’m Isobel.” She holds up the plate and two forks. “And this
is your lunch.”
I take one, grinning. “I’m
Gwen. And you, Isobel, are an angel.”
She says, “The plate’s hot.
Grab a tray.”
I pick up a neon green tray
from a short stack near the door.
“Not those.” Isobel points to a
larger stack of brown trays.
She leads the way to the dining
room, hollering over her shoulder, “I’m going on break.” We sit across from
each other, the plate between us. I dig in, but Isobel sits silently, looking
at the food. I say, “This is wonderful.”
She sits very still for another
moment, then says, “Thanks.”
We each eat off one half of the
plate. A sorority easiness forms between us, which is startling. I rarely feel at
ease with new people, even co-workers, preferring the comfort of solitude to
forced chatter around the water cooler. But with Isobel, I’m not thinking about
the dead people below my feet, or Bernie’s talking piano, not even about the
time traveler – although questions about why he called out my name are never
far from my mind. That, and why Brad Johnson shut me out.
Isobel turns to the table next
to us, interrupting the conversation of the three women sitting there. “He’s back?”
The women’s faces glow with
their secret. I missed what they were talking about, but obviously, Isobel didn’t.
I stab a broccoli flower with my fork. “Who’s back?”
The older women, a full-faced
salt and pepper gal I’d peg for fiftyish, falls over herself to answer. “You don’t
know?”
Her two companions grin at each
other.
I chew the broccoli. There’s a slight nutty
flavor and I mentally remind myself to ask Isobel what sauce she used, but I’m
too busy tasting it to ask about it. “Nope.” I pop a piece of carrot into my mouth.
Isobel turns to the beaming
trio. “When did this happen?”
Salt and Pepper says, “Last
night. Apparently, he walked through the front door like he had something to
confess.”
I sit high on my tailbone,
spine like a rod. “Who?” But I already know.
***
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Copyright 2013 by Bonnie Grove
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