“Where were you?”
“I was in a LINAC. Every day. Every morning for ten weeks.”
“What’s a LINAC?”
“A linear particle accelerator. It’s a big tube they slide you inside to shoot radiation into you.”
The doctor let the boy take his time.
“I had surgery, and they didn’t get it all. I was in my second round of radiation. The first one didn’t do anything. The oncologist said, ‘Going in again is a long shot, but hey, what do you have to lose?’ ”
Dr. Terry looked at a fifteen-year-old face wearing the exhaustion of an old man.
“I was in a radiation tube. Every day. I took the subway up there in the morning and drank seven cups of water, and they called me in and loaded me into the big radiology machine like a bullet going into the chamber of a pistol. The prostatectomy didn’t get it all. That was a sad day, when we got that news. I did one long round of radiation in the spring, but the PSA kept climbing. We tried a second round, along with hormone shots to slow it down. I would lie on that tray and they would slide me into the tube up to my chest, and I would stare at the ceiling where they had painted an apple tree against a summer sky. And they would play the Beatles over the speakers to drown out the hum of the radiation machine, and I thought, ‘Doesn’t that tree with the apples look like the tree that hangs over our pool? Six months and I’ll be back there.’ Five days a week for ten weeks. And in the end it didn’t stop the cancer.”
The doctor waited to see if the boy would say anything else. He did not.
“So you came here.”
“I guess so.”
“Now we know.”
“We don’t know how to get me back.”
“Peter.” Terry Canyon put his hand on Peter’s arm. “There’s nothing there for you to go back to.”
Peter’s eyes turned red and he said, “I should have seen it right away. Why else would I be sent to live among ghosts? I must be a ghost too.”
TWENTY-FIVE
Well, I went back to see about it once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn’t know who I was talking about
—Bob Dylan, “Red River Shore”
Most days Peter’s mother woke before dawn. She would lie on her back in the half light and listen to the old house breathe. She knew the whispers and cracks, the hiss of the pipes in the walls in the winter. Now, in the spring, birds were singing scales through the window screens. Squirrels leaped from the roof to high branches. She hung suspended between waking and dreaming, her awareness flowing through the pulsing life in the green around them. She imagined she could feel in her own chest the rapid breathing of the rabbits crouched under the hedges, the crows perched on thin limbs, the moles nosing through the woods. This dream space between unconsciousness and waking was the only time that was completely hers.
Howard loved the farm, but in her heart she wished they had never left the ranch house where the children were born. It was crowded but filled with life. She liked having neighbors on all sides, she liked being immersed in community. What they had now was the dream Howard had worked for. It was never her dream. She never told him. The girls were grown and gone now. Only Peter, the baby, was at home. It was too many rooms for them already.
Since Peter’s problems appeared, she no longer allowed herself to drift back to sleep at daybreak. When she first woke now, she was up for the day. She recognized a creaking in the floorboards in the corridor. Peter was walking. She knew all her children’s footfalls. When the girls were little she and Howard would be in the living room watching TV and there would be a groan in the ceiling and she would say, “Cathy’s up.” Howard would ask how she knew it was Cathy and not Sally or Peter or the sound of the house settling, and she would go upstairs and find Cathy making her way to the bathroom half-asleep. Fathers didn’t even know how little they knew.
She went into the hall and found Peter in sneakers, gym shorts, and a sweatshirt. It was 5:00 a.m. She asked where he was going.
“For a run, Mom. This body is so resilient. I can run for miles, sit down for five minutes, and run again. No soreness in my knees, no stiffness afterward. My heart is indestructible. And my senses—they’re all turned up. The scent of hyacinths in our yard is like candy. Yesterday I grabbed a tomato from Mr. North’s garden. It was like biting into Eden. Every cell in me is alert. I wonder if you’d drive me to the public pool when I come back? I’d love to do some laps before school.”
She was concerned. He looked at her with sympathy.
“I’m not manic, Mom,” he said. “I’m trying to see my being here as a blessing. I’m going to learn to accept it as a gift. I have so much energy, stamina. I want to take advantage of it while I can.”
The last three words bothered her. She said, “Go run. I’ll start breakfast.”
He kissed her cheek and said, “Oatmeal, okay? Or fruit. No bacon, no white bread. I love you, Mom.”
She put on her robe and went downstairs to the kitchen. When he returned, pink-faced and shining with sweat, he ate oatmeal and strawberries. She served him and then sat with him and engaged with the delusion.
“Do you feel any more settled now, Peter? In this time?” she asked.
He wasn’t going to tell her about the cancer. There was no reason for her to know.
He said, “I know how nuts it sounds, Mom, but I still have all the memories of a sixty-five-year-old man from 2020. I know it’s scary for you to hear me say that, and I appreciate being able to discuss it rationally.” She nodded, and he took a bite of strawberry and added, “I also appreciate that rationally is an odd word to use in this circumstance.”
“How do you imagine you got here?”
“I’m willing to accept any explanation. Religion, science fiction, sorcery. I would subscribe to any narrative that eventually returned me to my wife and kids.”
His mother asked him to tell her about them.
“A girl and two boys. They’re pretty much grown. The youngest is in college now. University of California.”
“California? Didn’t you tell us you lived in New York?”
“In the future kids from all over the country compete for the same colleges. It’s not like now when you go to the best school you can get into within sixty miles of home. When I went to Dartmouth, my friends were astonished I was going out of state.”
His mother looked surprised. She said, “You got into Dartmouth?”
“SATs, Mom. Turns out I test well. All your worry is for nothing.”
“Tell me about your wife.”
“You would love Janice. You will love her. She’s smart, she’s funny. She’s a fierce mother. Comes from Long Beach, Long Island. Her father was chief of police! Gus Crowley. Tough guy, but really decent. Almost made a Mets fan out of me.”
“And your children?”
“Your grandchildren, Mom. James is a sportsman. From the time he was little he was always going fishing, riding bikes and skateboards. He played lacrosse in college. He works for a company selling athletic equipment now, just to pay the rent. Jenny is like you—a scholar. Speaks four languages. Did a summer internship at NATO in Belgium. She’s teaching in DC now, hoping to get into the diplomatic corps. Pete Junior is doing film studies. He makes money working as an extra in every movie and TV show shot in LA. Janice and I go to the movies and look for him. He saves his money, and when classes are out he heads off to Mexico or Europe or Alaska. Last summer he backpacked across China!”
Peter’s voice got softer. He said, “I understand that the evidence is that none of this is real. That Janice and our family don’t exist. That the world isn’t turning out to be how I remember it. I understand I may have come to the end of that life and been given the gift of starting again. But for all that, I do believe I’ll find a way back to them.”
His mother took his empty oatmeal bowl and his plate and put them in the sink and turned on the
faucet.
She spoke to him without turning around. She said, “Every life has layers, Peter. Everyone has things they don’t talk about. It doesn’t make them less real. It might make them more precious. I don’t understand why you’re going through this challenge right now. But I know it will be easier for you if you find a way to behave so that the world won’t throw barriers up at you.”
“Pretend I’m not crazy, you mean.”
“You’re not crazy. Maybe you really are foreseeing your future life, picking up signals in some way we don’t understand. It may become a source of strength for you. It could become an advantage. But only if you behave discreetly. If you talk about this to people who don’t love you, it will hurt you.” She turned off the water and looked him in the eye. “Do you agree with me?”
“Blend in.”
“Try.”
He pushed his chair back from the table and stood. She thought he had grown another inch in the last week. He was already taller than his father.
He said, “It’s good advice, Mom. Thank you.”
His mother told him to get dressed and she would drop him at the pool. On the drive over she told him a story.
“You know I was raised Catholic, Peter. I drifted away from it in college, and your father’s family was somewhat prejudiced, so we married in the Episcopal church. But when I was a little girl I was very concerned with exactly how it all worked. The logic behind the Scriptures and teachings. In catechism class the nun told us that there was no conception of time in heaven. Once you ascended to paradise, you could look back at all of human history like a picture book. You could skip from the dinosaurs to the cowboys, back to the creation and forward to the end of time. I raised my hand and asked if that meant that when we got to heaven we could look back at our own lives on Earth. The sister said, ‘Yes, you surely could.’ I said, ‘You mean I might be in heaven right now, looking at myself asking you this question?’ The sister said, ‘Well, yes. But we don’t know for sure if you are going to heaven.’ I said, ‘And we can pray to the saints in heaven for intercession with the Lord? To hear our petitions?’ The sister agreed that was true. I said, ‘Well, then, assuming I will someday get to heaven, that means I can pray to myself for help right now!’ I was sent home from Sunday school with a note from the Mother Superior saying I needed to stop being such a smarty-pants.
“My mother was a rigorous thinker, a Catholic intellectual. She raced right over to the convent and defended me. I never did hear exactly what she said to the nuns, but I was treated with respect in Sunday school from that day forward.”
“Strong mothers,” Peter said. “An inherited attribute.”
“That’s not the story I want to tell you. It’s what my mother said to me about time. After she came back from seeing the sisters, my mother said that time is like a winding river. If you’re sitting on the bank of the river and a motorboat goes by in the morning, by noon that boat is in your past. And if there’s a sailboat coming slowly toward you, still a mile away, that sailboat is in your future. That’s the nature of time. But imagine a man standing on top of a mountain looking down at the river. To him, you, the motorboat, and the sailboat are all visible at once. He can see what to you is past, present, and future. Time isn’t fixed. Time depends on where you’re watching from.”
Peter considered the story. He never remembered his mother talking to him like this. They pulled up to the public swimming pool.
She said, “The universe is mysterious, Peter. I can’t guess why you’re here, but don’t be in a hurry to leave us. As long as you’re here, try to live fully in the time you’re given.”
Peter swam for an hour, showered, and walked to school. First period was English. He was standing in the corridor outside the classroom, thinking about his mother’s advice, when he saw his old crush Amy Blessen coming toward him, carrying her books. Her hair as blond as sun, her eyes as blue as sea, her skin as brown as sand. He took a deep breath, like a diver.
He said, “Amy, I saw the end of the field hockey game. You were great.”
If she was surprised to have the crazy boy speak to her, she didn’t show it. She said, “Thanks, Peter. It was a good game.”
“Hey, I was thinking. I have tickets for James Taylor at Brown on Saturday. Would you like to go?”
Peter thought time was stopping all over again. Amy looked surprised, and then she smiled. “Sure, I’d like to see James Taylor.”
“Great,” Peter said. “It’s part of their spring weekend. He plays outside Saturday afternoon.”
“Oh, in the afternoon? Saturday afternoons we have games.”
“Ah, okay. Well, just an idea.”
“I wish I could.”
The bell rang, and they both went into class. Peter didn’t feel sixty-five. He didn’t feel fifteen either. He felt neither old nor young. He felt like he was standing on top of a mountain, looking down at the boats in a winding river.
TWENTY-SIX
Peter gave the DeVilles a cassette with some more songs he thought they could do at their demo session, “Radar Love” and “Taking Care of Business” among them. Rocky asked him to write something for Daphne to sing, and the boy gave them a tape of himself singing a falsetto version of “Afternoon Delight.” It was meant to discourage Daphne’s joining in on the recording, but she said she loved it and made the DeVilles learn to play it. Lou Pitano said it was the best song of the bunch.
So it was a surprise when Peter went to a band meeting at the DeVille house and they fired him.
“We intend to keep you on as a writer,” Lou Pitano explained. “But we’re going with Daphne as the singer. Frankly, Peter, I have a certain image in mind, and you don’t fit it. Nothing personal. Ricky, Rocky, and Barry have a look.”
“Well,” Peter pointed out, “they are brothers.”
“Exactly,” Lou said. “And Daphne, she’s this beautiful flower child.”
“I get the picture,” Peter said. He was offended in principle but not particularly disappointed. His goal was to make some money on music publishing, not become Foghat.
Lou Pitano would certainly be upset when he found out that Peter had copyrighted all the songs and they wouldn’t be able to release them without his permission, but he decided to sit on that information for a while.
Barry DeVille was strutting around the room like a bouncer, waiting for any excuse to toss Peter out on his ass. Daphne was folded into Rocky like he was her chair. Their fingers were entwined.
The only thing that hurt Peter’s feelings was that his new friend Ricky had gone along with the coup. Peter looked at Ricky, his long hair covering his aviator glasses, and said, “You agree with this, Rick?”
Ricky DeVille looked up with intensity and snapped, “Never get between family.”
Peter didn’t know what that meant. Barry stopped pacing and glared at him. Then Peter got it. He looked at Daphne, who affected a false concern. She had surely suggested to the brothers that Peter had eyes for their mother. Under those circumstances he was lucky he hadn’t ended up strung from a ceiling fan like Mrs. Quigly’s cat.
Wendy DeVille was nowhere to be seen. Her sons had picked a time when she wouldn’t be home to excommunicate the interloper.
Peter stood and shrugged and asked if they wanted him at the recording session anyway. They were doing his songs…
Barry said no. Lou Pitano got up and, taking the boy by the elbow, walked him to the door. He stepped outside with him and whispered, “Nobody likes a smartass.”
Waiting on the street was Daphne’s friend Pasa. Peter assumed she had been sent outside while the ax fell, but it was quickly apparent that she had no idea what was going on with the DeVille brothers’ band.
“Peter,” she said in a whisper. “Is Daphne in there?”
“Uh, yeah, Pasa. Why don’t you go knock?”
She jumped back. “Oh no. I’m not going into that house. Daphne’s mother called my house looking for her. She told her mom we were having a sleepov
er. Now my mom’s freaking out and Daphne’s mother is threatening to call the police and have Rocky arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. Would you please go back and warn her to maybe get out of there before the cops come?”
Peter stood there thinking about it.
“You know, Pasa,” he said, “the greatest act of friendship we could show Daphne might be for us to do nothing and let the law take its course. Get her away from that Manson family before she’s hopelessly corrupted.”
Pasa nodded.
Peter figured that if Rocky ended up in jail for statutory rape, they would have to let him back in the band. It was cruel, but he was more hurt than he was ready to let on.
TWENTY-SEVEN
They ate dinner early in 1970. By five thirty the dishes were cleared and the TV went on. The local news, then Walter Cronkite, then some black-and-white rerun before prime time started at seven thirty. The Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Room 222, The Johnny Cash Show. No one paid attention to what was on; the TV screen was like a fireplace. Peter’s mother read a Gore Vidal paperback while his father looked through the Saturday Review. Both parents had cigarettes lit and resting on ashtrays. Peter’s homework was spread out on the carpet. He was trying to think of something to say about Ethan Frome.
The sports report was on in the background. Peter heard the words “Long Beach, Long Island.” His wife’s hometown. He looked up at the screen.
“Many hockey fans called him the greatest goalie of all time. Sawchuk achieved fame with the Detroit Red Wings and was a New York Ranger when his famous temper got him into the barroom brawl that killed him. Terry Sawchuk, dead at forty.”
The sports reader went on to talk about the Red Sox. Peter was alert now. He said, “Dad—who is Sawchuk? Hockey player who just died?”
His father looked over his reading glasses. “Terry Sawchuk? Used to play with the Bruins.”
“They said his home was in Long Beach, Long Island.”
Fifty in Reverse Page 13