Time of Departure

by Douglas Schofield

  “Facepage?”

  “Facebook. And, no.”

  “Why?”

  “Too many people posting lame jokes and photos of their latest restaurant meal.” I sighed, struggling to find the right words. “I don’t know how to explain it—it’s like really annoying background noise. I just thought I had better things to do with my time.”

  “Like … traveling through it.”

  All I could do was nod bleakly.

  The long narrative of my own life was easy: my father’s disappearance just before my sixth birthday; my mother’s remoteness—and her abiding strength—my years in school and college; my doomed relationship with a lecherous law school teacher; my climb up the greasy pole at the State Attorney’s Office; my abiding love and respect for Sam Grayson, who had always looked out for me and had never once given me a reason to doubt his motives. I laid it all out for him, unadorned and unvarnished.

  But those two days were spent covering only what I could tell him.

  By Saturday night, my narrative had reached that pivotal scene when Marc’s older and infinitely wiser self reentered my life. Our first encounter in the courthouse lobby was limpid in my memory, and I recited our conversation word for word. It was almost hilarious to see Young Marc’s expression as I recounted my snarky exchange with his older self.

  “‘Intriguing and beautiful’?” he gawped. “I said that to a girl half my age, a girl I didn’t … didn’t even…?” He trailed off, confused.

  I finished the thought for him. “Didn’t even know?” I took his hand. “But you did! You knew me because we’re together now! You’re going to say those words to me in thirty years when I don’t know you!”

  His face went ashen. “If you don’t know me thirty years from now, where are you going to be? You … the girl I’m talking to right now.”

  I felt sick. I knew it would come to this. I had just hoped it wouldn’t be … so soon.

  I was direct. I had to be, even if I sounded cruel.

  “Where do you think I’ll be, Marc? I’m not born yet. What do you think will happen on the day I’m conceived?”

  I had told him my birthdate on that first day, sitting in his police car. Then, he’d thought I was either playing games or deranged. Now I sat watching him trying to do the calculations.

  He gave up.

  “How long do we have?”

  “Until March,” I said. “The fourth, to be exact.”

  “Less than a year?”

  “Yes. I was premature.”

  “How do you know? How could you know that? How?” I saw the man I loved crumble before my eyes. I had just dragged him into the psychological wasteland I had been struggling through from the moment I accepted my new reality.

  “When I was seventeen, my mom and I had one of those mother-daughter moments. They were very rare with her. I knew from comments she’d made over the years—and from an overheard conversation with my aunt Bev, her sister—that her marriage to my father had been in trouble even before I was born. I was a typical know-it-all teenager, and my mom and I had gotten into an argument about my snippy attitude, and it just escalated. “Why was I even born?” “You never loved my dad.” “Why did you get pregnant if you didn’t love him?” That sort of thing. When all the yelling and sobbing was over, and we’d both calmed down, Mom made us some tea and told me about their marriage. I won’t get into it now, but basically it was the old story—she loved not wisely, but too well. Dad was a rep for a building supply chain and he was on the road a lot. At first he didn’t like being away from her, but over time, that seemed to change. She started to get the sense that he looked forward to his trips. And the separations started to get longer.”

  “Claire…” Marc was pale, impatient, hanging on my words.

  “I’m getting to it.”

  “Okay.”

  “Now we’re in early 1979. My father had been away on business a lot since Christmas, but even when he was home, he was quiet and distant. Aunt Bev was telling Mom she should get a divorce, and Mom had even spoken to a lawyer. But one morning she got up and found my dad sleeping on the couch. He told her he’d come in after midnight and didn’t want to wake her.

  “They had breakfast and spent the day together. They drove to Cedar Key, did some shopping, and walked on the pier. Everywhere they went, he held her hand. She said he seemed different. They bought some fresh shrimp from a fisherman and came back to the house and she made shrimp creole. They made love that night, for the first time in a long time. She told me that was when I was conceived.”

  “But how could she be sure? He was home! It could have been that night, or the next night, or a week later! How could she know the exact date?” His voice was a deathly rasp as he clutched at straws.

  “It could have been another date. If he had stayed. But he left for Atlanta the following day. He was gone for over a month.”

  The air went out of him. “No! No! Not after all this! No!” He wrapped me in his arms. We sank to the floor.

  “We have to face it, my love. You have to face it!”

  His face seemed ripped open, distorted by a level of anguish beyond all imagination. All imagination except mine.

  I kissed him. “I love you. We’re together now. And one thing is certain: We’ll be together again.”

  He looked at me.

  “Your future … my memories,” I whispered.

  An unearthly moan came from deep in his chest. He pulled me close and hung on for dear life.

  As far as I knew, I had another year to live.

  But part of me died right then.

  * * *

  On Sunday, by tacit agreement, we didn’t return to that subject.

  Over the morning and into the early afternoon, I walked Marc through the events of my final months in the future. In other words, the time I had spent with him. But now I had to be selective, and the accounts I gave became more and more like thin slices of Swiss cheese. I told him about the missing person files he delivered to my office. I snared his attention when I related how I’d been warned to steer clear of him. That took us into a long sidebar about Lipinski. He wasn’t in the least surprised at the man’s oafish incompetence—he’d seen all the signs already—but he was disgusted to learn that he was destined for promotion to lieutenant. I told him about the attack on me in the parking lot, about his timely and decisive intervention, and about my visit with Lipinski and Geiger in the squad room. I told him about following him to The Yearling, and the brawl in the bar.

  “Eight fourteen P.M.,” I said. “You have to remember that.”

  He nodded, his eyes locked on mine.

  But, overall, more and more of the story had to be told with fewer and fewer details. I could tell him about his visit to the morgue to deliver dental records, but not whose records, because Amanda Jordan’s was among them. I couldn’t mention his examination of Amanda’s skeletal remains—or Jane Doe’s, for that matter. I told him about my visits to his loft apartment, and about his mirror version of the police investigation file—I had to tell him that so he would get started—but I could only summarize the events that followed. How we found the bodies, how many there were, the identity of the killer … I couldn’t tell him any of that. I couldn’t tell him what he really needed to know as a working detective in 1978, because if he and I were destined to solve these crimes together in thirty years’ time, he couldn’t be allowed to solve them now.

  I now believed that if I told him everything I knew, and he acted on the knowledge, the future would be indelibly changed. If I told him Amanda Jordan was next, he’d do everything in his power to save her. If he succeeded—if Amanda survived, and Tribe was caught, and the bodies were found—then our joint investigation in the future would never have happened.

  My memories of our months together would be erased …

  I would never have boarded that train …

  I would never have plummeted into the past.

  This Claire Talbot—the only one I kne
w, the one Marc loved—would never have existed.

  So I faced an agonizing choice: sacrifice my own life now, or let Amanda Jordan die.

  It was a lead weight in my heart.

  I finished my narrative with an account of our idyllic weeks together after my disgrace, culminating in my discovery of the photograph album he had kept and storming off to meet my fate on the train.

  The photograph album brought us back to the fraught emotional subject we had been carefully avoiding. Marc’s eyes were filled with hurt and fear and helpless anger. He’d been forced to confront, in just three days, what had taken me far longer to comprehend.

  “So this is my destiny? To lose you, and go through years of torture, watching you grow up? To shadow you all your life, taking pictures for that album, until the day I walk into that courthouse … and then to lose you again!”

  “Just as my destiny was to be here with you. To have these months.”

  “It’s not fair!” He was crying out, not at me, but at fate, or at the heavens, or maybe at God himself … at whatever or whoever was responsible for this onslaught of agony and confusion.

  I tried to answer calmly. “Not much is, my love.”

  “It also makes no sense! It has no purpose! You tell me the missing girls are already dead—all victims of a single killer! But I can’t arrest the sick bastard because that might change our history together, and even eliminate you—or even both of us—from existence!”

  “Me, probably. At least, this me. Not you.”

  “And yet, thirty years from now, you and I will work together to track the killer down and bring him to trial?”

  “Yes.” I knew what was coming.

  “But, even then, he still walks free! So what’s the point, Claire? What’s the point?”

  “I don’t know. But there must be a reason. It just isn’t clear to us yet.”

  “How can we wait? How can I wait? I’m a cop. There’s a monster out there, as bad as Bundy, and I’m not allowed to stop him!”

  “If we don’t wait, my past with you didn’t happen, and your future with me never will. Maybe the whole point of my life is to change the future! But if that’s true, and if we decide today to change history, logic says I will no longer exist. At least I will no longer exist here and now with you. Maybe another version of me will be born next year and live a life entirely different from the one I remember. Maybe I’ll disappear into some parallel existence. I don’t know. But your memories of me will surely disappear. How could they not? You’d have no reason to have them! You solved the case in 1978! Why would you watch over me as I grow up? Why would you follow me through school? Why would you even know I existed?”

  “Because we’re together right now, and I can touch you, and that memory is permanent. You will write a long letter to yourself, in your own handwriting, describing every minute we’ve had together. We’ll include some photographs. When you’re grown, I’ll show you the letter. I’ll make you love me again.”

  I steeled myself and said what had to be said: “If you’re right, we might be together again … one day. If you’re not, your memories will be gone, and the letter and even the photographs—if they continue to exist, which I doubt—will be meaningless to you. Are you willing to take that chance? I will, if you will. I’ll write that letter, we’ll take some Polaroid photographs, and then I will tell you everything.”

  He was silent for long, tortured seconds. Finally, with a gasp of pain, he capitulated to his doubts. “No. I’m too afraid to be wrong.” He took me in his arms and spoke quietly in my ear. “But…”

  “Yes?”

  “You are certain another woman will die?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will always hate myself.”

  Marc didn’t speak for the rest of the day. I left him alone. He sat on the veranda for a while, and then went for a long boat ride on the lake. We ate a quiet supper and retired to bed early. The doctor had forbidden sex until a follow-up urine sample was cleared by the lab, but sex was the furthest thing from our minds. I lay there wrapped in Marc’s arms, and after an eternity, I fell asleep.

  I woke up once in the night and heard him weeping. I slipped my arms around him and he stopped. He’d been crying for us—and perhaps for himself, humiliated that I seemed to be the strong one.

  But he was the strong one, not me. I knew that because I had seen the man he would become.

  Marcus Daniel Hastings would bear a devastating, unthinkable burden for more than thirty years and never lose his sanity.

  45

  The English word “scheduled” normally conveys a fairly innocuous and businesslike concept. For death row inmates, of course, the word carries a rather more pitiless connotation—one that is anything but innocuous. As the days ticked by, the only difference between those luckless prisoners and Amanda Jordan was the fact that Harlan Tribe’s last victim had no inkling of her impending fate.

  Amanda was scheduled to be abducted on April 22, and she was scheduled to die, I surmised, very soon thereafter.

  And I was going to let it happen.

  But then something changed.

  In the wake of the last two disappearances, Marc was spending long hours at work. He didn’t want to be there. He was still reeling from my revelations and his experience on the Chan case. He knew his task force would never solve the crimes, and he just wanted to be with me.

  He just wanted to spend every waking and sleeping minute with me and shut the world out of our lives.

  I wasn’t in good shape myself, psychologically or physically, and it was several days before I could bring myself to return to The Yearling. When I eventually showed up, Nonie welcomed me back, asked enough questions to satisfy herself that I had recovered enough to work, and then left me to get on with it. With Marc gone for days at a time, I ended up working ten straight days without a break. The disciplined schedule helped take my mind off my intractable dilemma—at least for a part of each day—and as time went by, I began to feel better physically. Even my appetite was returning.

  On Monday, April 17, Marc drove me to Ocala for my scheduled follow-up visit with Dr. LaPierre. While Marc went off with our grocery list, I submitted to another ultrasound. Fifteen minutes later, Dr. LaPierre entered the consulting room.

  Seeing the tension in my face, he quickly set me at ease. “Relax, Claire. It’s good news.”

  I relaxed.

  “Blood and urine results are fine, and the sonogram showed no anomalies. You’ll be peeing just fine well into old age.” He paused. “There is one thing, though.”

  My heart sank. “Is this about that old surgery?”

  “Not exactly…”

  He sat down.

  * * *

  I was a coward.

  I was a coward because all the way home, I didn’t say a word to Marc about what Dr. LaPierre had discovered. I just said I’d been given a clean bill of health and suggested we go home and make love.

  But that was just a distraction.

  I had to tell him.

  The next morning, it was my turn to make breakfast. I went all out and produced what my mother used to call a “logger’s breakfast”—sausages, bacon, eggs, hash browns, pancakes, and toast. When I set the plates on the table, Marc blinked.

  I sat down, grinned at him, and started in.

  “This is a lot of food,” he observed.

  “I guess it is.” I poured maple syrup over the pancakes, sliced into the stack, and slid a triangle of sweetness into my mouth.

  “I’ve never seen you eat that much.”

  “I’ve been sick, remember? All those antibiotics didn’t help my appetite. I’m just getting it back.”

  “It seems more like you got somebody else’s appetite back.”

  Tell him!

  I set down my fork. “Marc.”

  “What?”

  “I’m eating for two.”

  He leaned forward. “Are you saying you’re pregnant?”

  “No. But that�
��s what the doctor is saying.”

  A grin started spreading across his face.

  “I didn’t even notice I’d missed my period. The ultrasound tipped them off, but it’s too early to see much. The blood test was positive.”

  Tell him the other part!

  “How far along are you?”

  Bingo …

  “They’re not sure yet. Best guess is I’m due in November.”

  It didn’t take a genius to count backwards. Marc’s face registered uncertainty. “Claire, is this baby mine?”

  Got it in one …

  I sighed. “One way or another, this baby is yours.”

  “One way or another?” He swallowed. “Wait a minute, are you’re saying—?”

  “Yes. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “You’re saying I made love to you in 2011, and you’re having our baby in 1978?”

  “That depends on her date of birth. If it’s in early November, then Old Marc is probably the father. Late November, probably you. Where the cutoff would be is anybody’s guess. But either way, you’re Dad.”

  He stared at me, speechless.

  I picked a stray piece of bacon off my plate and nibbled at it. “You’re not talking, Marc.”

  “Did you just say ‘her date of birth’?”

  “Her name is Rebecca.”

  “How could you know that?”

  “You told me you had a daughter named Rebecca.”

  Marc looked sick. “This means…” He trailed off.

  “For one thing,” I said, trying to distract him with a bit of offbeat humor, “it means our daughter will be a year older than her mother, which has to be a first.”

  My ploy didn’t work. Marc replied tonelessly, “It also means I’m going to be a single dad.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  I could see his mind working. “Claire…”

  “Yes?”

  “Your theory is that two of you can’t exist in the same time period. That’s why you think you’ll cease to exist as an adult after your date of conception next March.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But if you’re right about that,” he continued, speaking slowly, “and if Rebecca was conceived in the future before you stormed out of my life and boarded that train, she will cease to exist as an adult at the age of thirty-two.”